Looking and painting

Moving between representation and abstraction, referencing design and embracing the decorative, British artist Tim Braden's work is a celebration of the act of making things. His paintings evolve from historical anecdotes surrounding twentieth-century artists and designers such as Sonia Delaunay and painter-turned-modernist-landscape-architect Roberto Burle Marx.

Braden plays with scale and expectation, creating "found" abstract compositions from cropped fragments of his own figurative paintings that are realised as oversized watercolour paintings on canvas, or small oil sketches on card. Painterly themes like the interior and the landscape are key motifs in his work, as well as depictions of the experience of looking at art in situ.

Assembling a body of work produced over the last decade, and drawing together the many themes and styles of his work, Looking and Painting is the first monograph on Braden in ten years. The book brings together, for the first time, manypaintings that have never been shown in public.

Tim Braden: Looking and Painting includes a response to Braden's work by Jennifer Higgie, editor of Frieze magazine, and contributions by Christopher Bedford, director of the Baltimore Museum of Fine Art, and Dominic Molon, curator at Rhode Island School of Design Museum.

Braden has exhibited widely, including at Baibakov Art Projects, Moscow; Gemeente Museum, The Hague; Hamburger Bahnhof at Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin; Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo; Museum Van Loon, Amsterdam; the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam; and the Goethe Institute, New York. He lives and works in London.