Lot 52: TIM STONER

TIM STONER BRITISH B.1970 VENUS(2) watercolour on paper 38.5 x 46.5 cm / 15.16 x 18.31"

Some recent solo exhibitions
Alison Jacques Gallery, London 2007
Engholm Engelhorn Gallerie, Vienna 2004, 'Sombrero'
Junge Kunst, Wolfsburg 2003, 'Affinity'
The Approach, London 2002, 'Rise and Fall'
Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam, Amsterdam 2002, 'The Power of Partnership'

Some recent group exhibitions
Galerie Diana Stigter, Amsterdam 2009, 'The Clotted Body'
Deutsche Guugenheim, Berlin / Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo 2005, '25 Years of Deutsche Bank Collection'
British Council Exhibition, Athens 2004, 'Britannia Works'
Artemis Greenberg Van Doren Gallery, New York 2004, 'She's Come Undone'
Frankfurter Kunstverein 2003, 'Nation'

Selected publications
Frieze Art Fair: Yearbook 2007-8, [s.l.]: Frieze 2007
Martin Herbert, Tim Stoner: affinity, Wolfsburg: Junge Kunst 2003

Selected public and corporate collections
Royal College of Art Galleries, London, GB • De Nederlandsche Bank, NL • Kunstcollectie Stichting Océ Kunstbezit, NL • Deutsche Bank Collection, DE • Volpinum Kunstsammlung, Vienna, AT

donated by the artist

Like a translation of modernism into history painting Tim Stoner's work examines what brings people together in public space. Earlier tableaux registered the idealism of this coming together, along with its dark-side; the possibility of totalitarian or fascist coercion, or the embodying of over-determined identities that efface the real for the sake of social cohesion. Since then, like progress in the twentieth century, the dilemma for Stoner's collective protagonists has become one of finding a new order under which to galvanise collective action in public space. To put it more crudely, Stoner's work is now registering the age of television, and the beginning of what we might term virtual culture, our second reality. Public space has become cyberspace. What was once the town hall and then the mall is now deserted. The space has become flat and infinite - the abstract shapes and colours reflect a benign yet slightly threatening multiplicity, abstraction under the aegis of neo-liberalism. The optimistic tone of these geometric and brightly coloured forms are made to seem menacingly empty. They remind us that our embrace of seemingly inclusive neo-liberal ideology can be a mask to hide dark, irrational desires from ourselves. They depict a world a bit like our own but one in which the human keeps on dancing through our heads to the tune of an unknowable, alien order (Daniel Coombs, 2010).

Tim Stoner was resident artist at the Rijksakademie in 1997-1998.
He won the Beck's Futures Award in 2001.

www.timstoner.co.uk