Tim Gardner: The Full Story

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Tim Gardner, “Venice Parking Lot,” 2022

watercolour, 9.78" x 13" (photo courtesy of the gallery)

Tim Gardner made his name in the early 2000s with paintings of young middle-class white guys, in backyards, in hotel rooms, sometimes on spring break. They drink, they eat junk food, they stuff beer cans down their pants, they run naked, they goof around.

The American-born Canadian painter’s look at bro culture is straight-on, not loaded up with satirical edge or packed with political commentary, but it’s not macho. Tim Gardner: The Full Story is his first major retrospective (on view at Winnipeg Art Gallery/Qaumajuq) and features more than 130 works from three decades. Its cumulative effect is thoughtful, poignant and often unexpected.

The first unusual aspect of the artist’s oeuvre is the medium: Gardner works predominantly in watercolour and sometimes in pastel. His pieces can come off as photographic, but they lack the smooth, shiny assertion of hyperrealist works done in acrylic or oil. Especially with the large-scale watercolours, there’s a sense of fragility and risk, the feeling that one mistake could wreck the whole thing.

Another factor here is the simple passage of time. While the early paintings may catch the unselfconscious immediacy, the pure physical joy of youth, when exhibited alongside work that spans the 30-year career of an artist who is now 50, the images hit in a different way, conveying that fleeting phase of life with a kind of retrospective pathos.

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Tim Gardner, “Roy with Red Cup,” 2012

pastel on paper, 42" x 36" (photo courtesy of the gallery)

Gardner also handles his subject matter ― even when it’s raucous ― in a way that feels modest and tender. Most of his works are explorations of the everyday, often based on casual snapshots given him by friends and family members. He’s interested in ordinary, undramatic moments ― a young man drinking his morning coffee, a shopper paused in the pet aisle of a grocery store. Other works draw from visually banal sources ― a Sears portrait studio-style group shot, a formal graduation picture ― that shift, slightly and mysteriously, when transmuted through Gardner’s delicate, drawn-out process.

Stephen Borys, director and CEO of WAG-Qaumajuq, curates the show of the former Winnipeg artist who is now based in Red Deer, Alta. He has organized the work by thematic concerns and spread it through several galleries, giving the paintings room to breathe. Text panels are largely Gardner’s own words, extending the intimate, affectionate connections between his work and life.

Landscape works convey Gardner’s sensitivity to the natural world, the cityscape, and ― in his recent Los Angeles paintings ― the contested terrain in between. In these paintings, Gardner often sneaks right up to the edge of kitsch without falling in. He rather bravely takes on sunsets, for example, which have largely been avoided by artists since they got dissed by Oscar Wilde.

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Tim Gardner, “L.A. Evening,” 2018

watercolour, 14" x 18" (photo courtesy of the gallery)

He explores ideas of the Romantic and the sublime, especially in his nocturnes and mountain works, but also undercuts them. Caspar David Friedrich is a clear influence in Gardner’s use of the Rückenfigur, a figure in a landscape shown only from the back, but his human subjects have none of that 19^th-century sense of mastery.  Gardner’s figures often look stranded in their surroundings, as if they don’t quite know what to do with all that beauty. Or they’re doing something mundane, as in Man on Highway, Going for Gas. In a 2019 work, Lake Louise and its surrounding peaks become the almost overlooked background to a meticulously detailed rendering of a room-service breakfast.

In 2 Men with Moon, LA, two figures take in a panoramic nighttime view from the Hollywood hills, one of them snapping a pic with his iPhone. In one sense, it’s a visual joke, a reference to Gardner’s layered method of working from photographs. In another sense, it’s a 21^st-century form of the sublime, mediated but still meaningful. ■

Tim Gardner: The Full Story is at the Winnipeg Art Gallery-Qaumajuq from Oct. 7 to April 7, 2024.

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