Andrew Kreps is very pleased to announce Pádraig Timoney's third solo show at the gallery entitled Peace Torques. Featuring painting, photography and installation, the exhibition is partially based on a sequence of poems by Li Shang Yin (813-858BC) known as The Walls of Emerald. Described as "dense and allusive", adequate translation of these poems is thought almost impossible. Timoney's meditations on The Walls of Emerald for this show - on issues of fragmentation and disavowal of the expectation of completion - are themes that have been at the core of Timoney's mercurial practice for over 20 years.
In appearance Timoney's paintings are radically diverse. He deploys an expansive repertoire – using expressive and hard-edged abstraction, realism, text and graphics, chemical treatments and found objects – to construct unique sets of images. These amount to an exploration of how paintings and their images are constructed, as objects and representations of phenomena. Timoney's work is in part founded in the classical role of the artist, recording subjective experience. Following playful idiosyncratic associations he breaks down and reconstructs what he reads, dreams, observes or thinks. In other instances he treats the canvas as space for alchemical-like transformations where mental processes, ideas and experience are materialised. Through various approaches to the reconstruction of images – materially, cognitively and perceptually – Timoney plays out his imagination over a dazzling variety of surfaces.
Pádraig Timoney was born in Derry, Northern Ireland and is currently based in New York. His recent exhibitions include a retrospective of works, Fontwell Helix Feely at Raven Row, and an upcoming show at MADRE Naples both in 2013. Recent gallery shows include Galleria Raucci/Santamaria, Naples, 2012; Shepard Tone, The Modern Institute, Glasgow, 2012; Instead of Being Lucky, Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York, 2010; and Buenas Noches, Laser, Galerie Xavier Hufkens, Brussels, 2010.