Tim Kent

Tim Kent (b. 1975) is a Canadian-American contemporary artist currently working in Brooklyn, New York, whose work engages with issues related to power in art and history, global infrastructures and social relations. During his time as a student at West Dean he was hired to create renderings of historic homes in England. This venture sparked his fascination with architectural space. Kent’s body of work consists of painted interiors and vistas, coalescing art historical genres of architecture and landscape through fragmentation and abstraction to create ethereal compositions that harbour a phantasmic psychological atmosphere. 

Kent transports the viewer into socio-psychological planes filled with gestural brush strokes and grid-like lines. This artistic method encompasses the mathematical teachings of visual perspective employed during the Renaissance. The formulaic details in Kent’s work suggest engineered plans of electrical grids, technological networks and other modern mechanical structures. By harnessing old art historical systems with his own contemporary twist, Kent paints a continuum of artificial

landscapes that exist in a state of flux, where new spaces unfold and emerge the more you look. 

Kent’s most recent solo exhibition Horsepower at JD Malat Gallery Dubai (2025) examines the historical and cultural significance of the horse – a universal symbol of power that has shaped art, society, and human innovation for millennia. His paintings trace a line of human ambition from the classical to the industrial, the mythological to the mechanical. Horsepower is explored as a measure of physical, technological, and political power. The exhibition continues his investigation into systems of value and transformation, creating spaces where past and present converge, and inviting viewers to reflect on how symbols evolve – from horse to engine to rocket – yet continue to shape our collective imagination. His work seeks to counteract the fixed nature and empirical portrayal of space and symbol in chamber art, transforming the genre from face-value depictions of truth to portrayals of mystery and peculiarity. 

Kent received his MA post-graduate degree in painting at the University of Sussex at West Dean in 2004 and then pursued an MA in Visual art at the University of Sussex, in 2005. He has exhibited his works extensively both in the UK and overseas, including London, New York, Turkey, Germany and Switzerland.