In Our Nature: TIM GARDNER, ANDREW VALKO, MIKE BAYNE, BRAD PHILIPS

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Tim Gardner, "Man in moonlight, Red River," 2017

oil on canvas, 24" x 18"

LANTERN presents some of Canada’s most accomplished realism artists together in one incredible group exhibition, "IN OUR NATURE" with Tim Gardner Andrew Valko, Mike Bayne, Brad Philips, opening Friday, February 2nd with a public reception from 7-10pm.

Behind the undeniable technical skill of the artists, themes of masculinity, sexuality, solitary heroism and public depression re-occur. These four artists approach their work from different emotional corners but their trajectories cross paths. For IN OUR NATURE, contemporary life is stark and isolated within its sad architecture, but is buoyed back by colour, lust, and the celestial forces of lighting both natural and photographic. The title refers to, in a masculine sense, how the naturalism is depicted and the personal ownership of it: our nature, our world. But also it is an adage we supply for how we navigate and reveal the world that we have constructed. 

Tim Gardner was born in Iowa City in 1973 and grew up in Canada. He received a BFA from the University of Manitoba in 1996 and an MFA from Columbia University in 1999. Since the late nineties, Gardner’s watercolours, pastels, and oil paintings have explored a specifically North 

American middle-class world of masculinity and the pictorial conventions used to document it. His early source materials comprise of photographic snapshots, either found or taken by the artist, that capture the rites of passage in which his subjects partake. In the years since, Gardner’s work has rekindled the sublime aesthetic of Romanticism, depicting his subjects engaged with the natural and urban environment. Nocturnal scenes influenced by Japanese woodblock prints further explore the identity of his figures amid sobering landscapes.

Tim Gardner has exhibited his work internationally at such institutions as The National Gallery, London, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Kunsthalle Basel, and the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver. His work is in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the National Gallery of Canada, among others. He appears courtesy of 303 GALLERY New York.

Brad Phillips is known for photorealist paintings that integrate literary references and texts. His canvases, which have become more autobiographical over the course of his career, tend to take a melancholic tone and address some of the darker

undercurrents of domestic life; he has cited the confessional poetry of Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath as influences. _Canadian Art

In the upcoming February edition of the French arts and cultural magazine Purple Diary, Brad Philips is listed as one of the 90 most influential people in the arts worldwide in 2018. He lived in Vancouver but now resides in Ontario. He has a strong Winnipeg connection, having been represented by Paul Butler’s Other Gallery, and working with critically-acclaimed Winnipeg film-maker Guy Maddin (Keyhole 2010), who also wrote an essay for a 2005 catalogue of Philips’ work. Brad has exhibited internationally and writes for multiple magazines. He appears courtesy of Division Gallery in Toronto & Montreal. 

“Andrew Valko, a painter living and working in Winnipeg and Vancouver, is known for his intense scenes of neon-lit motels, parking lots, drive-in theatres and lonely women in rooms—sitting, standing, lying, lost in a dreamy, often disappointed, state of mind” - On Art and Aesthetics magazine. 

Andrew Valko is originally from Prague, Czechoslovakia. He has had numerous solo exhibitions across Canada and internationally. Valko’s work has been published and reviewed in publications such as Border Crossings, A Magazine of the Arts, The New Yorker Magazine, Elm Street Magazine, Asian Art News, and Canadian Art. His work is included in many collections including The Canada Council Art Bank, Manitoba Art Council, The Winnipeg Art Gallery, The Claridge Collection / Bronfman Collection, Elizabeth Taylor, Los Angeles, California and the Canada Post Corporation. Andrew Valko appears courtesy of Mayberry Fine Art in Winnipeg.