For the 2026 edition of Art SG, Singapore, Frestonian Gallery is presenting a solo booth of new works – interiors and mountainscapes - by Tim Braden.
In approaching interiors Braden works in much the same way as when considering a garden. The balance is in giving time and consideration to all the many different objects, their contrasting colours and forms - the ‘planting’ of the room - and still allowing the painting to achieve a convincing and harmonious view of the whole. In practice it is rooms where that balance has already been most considered that primarily attract Braden as subjects, not just because they tend to be more ‘beautiful’ in the classic sense, but also because the sense of purpose and placement often reveals surprisingly clearly the personalities of the room’s owner and caretaker. Many of the interiors he paints are highly personal - ‘Interior with Hitchens’ for example is of the artist’s own west London home – or examinations of spaces close to the artist, or signifiers of particular moments and places visited such as ‘Interior Charleston’, inspired by the eponymous ‘headquarters’ of the Bloomsbury Group. Others are often further removed, inspired by images, often black & white, found in old magazines, allowing Braden a freer and more playful engagement with the subject through colour, surface and composition. Always, Braden indulges in the sheer pleasure of painting, testing the elasticity of form, shifting between graphic clarity and painterly looseness, and delighting in the challenge of representing space. Each interior in its own way is beautiful – Braden seems incapable of painting a room we would not ourselves wish to enter.
These interior works are complemented by two important exterior ‘waterfall’ works, an extension of his current exhibition in London, and each an example of the breadth of his eternal curiosity. Braden refers to the waterfall as ‘A wall of water, literally a river upended, a vertical landscape’. Here these powerful phenomena are caught in a single moment, frozen in time, and yet their awesome dynamism is retained. The focus, however, is a little off, or rather ‘off-set’. The strange chromatic haloing of the imagery is an allusion to the source material – the reproductions of nature photography in magazines and travel brochures. These are mountainscapes that are painted not just from the natural world, but from the popular imagination. Each of Braden’s works here, is a series of tangents and intrigues rendered in elegant and beguiling style - a series of journeys by the artist, that we are happily invited to join.
Frestonian Galleries Art SG presentation coincides with the publication of the second major monograph on Tim Braden’s work. ‘I Can See All The Colours Now’ (Anomie Publishing & Frestonian Gallery) as well as a parallel exhibition at Frestonian Gallery, London (closes 30th January)
Tim Braden was born in 1975 in Perth, Scotland. He received his MA from Ruskin School of Fine Art at Oxford University and attended Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam. Braden has exhibited widely, including at Baibakov Art Projects, Moscow; Gemeente Museum, The Hague; Hamburger Bahnhof at Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin; Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo; Museum Van Loon, Amsterdam; and Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam and the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds. His work is included in many public collections, including the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; Nederlandse Bank, Amsterdam; Pembroke College, Oxford; Walsall Museum and Art Gallery, UK; and the Zabludowicz Collection, London. In 2025, Braden has exhibited in Houston, Texas (McClain Gallery) and New York (Independent with Ryan Lee, NY & The Armory Show with Frestonian Gallery, London).
