'On Great Ancoats' by Tim Garner offers us a snapshot of the busy Manchester and Salford Inner Relief Route around the city centre. Another piece within Tim Garner's Northern Quarter series, a murky Manchester sky looms above this much-loved area where skyscrapers meet Victorian mills.
- Dimensions: 88 x 120cm
- Price: SOLD
'On Great Ancoats' by Tim Garner offers us a snapshot of the busy Manchester and Salford Inner Relief Route around the city centre. This compositions presents us with an image of a traditional Victorian building in Ancoats beneath a murky Manchester sky, with optimistic pops of blue attempting to pierce through the haze. Another piece within Tim Garner's Northern Quarter series, this piece depicts a well known area within the city centre, where the old and new Manchester fuse harmoniously. Though a much loved area, it has been portrayed by Garner in a visceral and familiar way that looks like it could be in any Northern city - a common theme within many of his artworks. Differently to many of Garner's other works in the same series, we are positioned on the ground in this piece, submerging us in the cityscape, as though we can feel the rhythm of the city around us. There is a certain balance within the composition of this piece - Garner is known for exploring various visual languages within his oeuvre, but without being too formulaic. Garner views painting as a way of interpreting what's around us in a way that's both physical and metaphysical - his works have their own agency in their ability to guide the eye and tell a story of a dynamic city. “I like showing that cityscapes can be avant-garde, radical, dynamic” Working with a combination of industrial materials such as metals and cement, Garner is able to appropriate the gritty physicality of the city, paired with a colour palette of metallics and iridescent paints to imbue texture, light and depth. These works are made using a rigorous process of applying layer upon layer of thinly mixed ground paint onto the surface, taking any time from ten days to three weeks to complete. Through this process, Garner is able to capture still moments in time, snapshots of the mundane, anti-landmarks of a city, expanded to large scale compositions which demand our time and attention. 'On Great Ancoats' is an example of Garner's ability to portray the 'anti-landmarks' of a city and turn them into works of fine art - his works are full of contradictions, and have a way of capturing both the stillness and movement of a city in a way that gives each work its own sense of life and agency.
Based in his home studio in Stockport, Tim Garner is an artist who captures cityscapes through his own avant-garde lens. Inspired from his time living between Manchester and Paris, Garner works from photography and photo collage as his primary references, taking advantage of their visual immediacy and accuracy. Paint and cement are then used as a way of injecting emotive layers of meaning, forming Garner's distinctive style and flair. Through this process Garner has established his own visual language, which is imbued with character. His works are comfortingly familiar to a Northern audience, whilst enlightening and educating wider audiences. A piece of Mancunian history, this artwork would be a valuable asset for any contemporary art space, collection or home.