John Timberlake

The Agency Contemporary Gallery is proud to present British artist John Timberlake with his well known series " Another Country" 1999-2001. The exhibition is Timberlake’s first solo show in London.

Timberlake fuses photomontage and painting to amazing effect. Inspired by the great British tradition of landscape painting from Turner to Constable, Timberlake generates oilpaintings which he then appropriates photographically. The added twist in his romantic landscapes is the repetitive insertion of a nuclear mushroom cloud in the sky and model figurines who are observing the spectacle. He stages the scenarios meticulously in a studio and photographs them highlighting both the painterly effect as well as their theatrical three-dimensionality.

In the light of recent events the nuclear threat which was centrestage of the global debate during the Cold War has become a diffused memory. The atomic age has been replaced by newer and different threats. Whilst nuclear scares remain real Timberlakes romantic renditions of the smoke of nuclear explosions as awe-inspiring forces of nature seem a very apt represenation. The universally recognizable shape of the mushroom cloud has become part of iconography and the modernday sublime. Timberlake makes use of that by integrating it into the British landscapes of early 19th century painting.

John Timberlake modernises the essence of landscape painting by inserting a manmade and distantly threatening phenomenon into the countryside idyll. The fact that his works are painterly photographs is an even more intriguing and contemporary response. Understated and essentially British Timberlake references the threat of scorched earth policies and man’s strife to supercede nature’s powers with works that are of astounding beauty and subliminal humour. Timberlake has shown internationally, a/o with gallery Sabine Wachters in Belgium and has also been selected for the current edition of East International at the Norwich gallery.

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John Timberlake - NEW WORKS