Tim Ellis

Tim Ellis (b. 1981, Chester) is an artist and designer living and working in London, who graduated from the Royal Academy of Art in 2009. His work is concerned with the abstraction of found imagery, and the shift of meaning through materials and techniques. The artist transforms his conducted research on cultural products into totemic sculptures and paintings.

Tim Ellis’s unique approach to art-making crafts a ubiquitous logic from the haphazard and coincidental. By drawing mental and tactile relations between materials and subtly altering their forms, Ellis highlights a sensitive interlacing between artifice and natural order. In Ellis’s work found objects such as plates, vases, and Christmas tree ornaments are reconfigured to become assemblages of totemic significance. His practice revolves around his idea that “a being has a primaeval desire to want to belong to something greater than oneself”. This ‘wanting to belong’ manifests itself in both the production and consumption of cultural artefacts. Whether in isolation or as a collection, artefacts are dependent on a creator, mediator and audience.

The paintings are part of an ongoing series that share the same title, United in Different Guises and are numbered accordingly. The title refers to a proposed shared function. This function sits somewhere between a communicative role and the symbolic. The source imagery used is a mixture of signage and design which is reconstructed to form gendered symbols. The paintings' scale and material quality mimic the appearance of flags and banners. The paintings are created on cotton pillow cases by staining them with an orange acrylic base coat and applying 6 layers of acrylic paint in various colours. The reverse side is painted with acrylic primer for stiffness. After completion, they are folded, scuffed, and worn to create a sense of history and age. What is left is an object that questions notions of symbolism and authenticity, allowing the work to function beyond the realms of painting.

His work – containing nods to contemporary artists such as Gert & Uwe Tobias; one can even find (perhaps less visceral) suggestions of origins in Viennese Actionist performances by artists such as Herman Nitsch – are loaded with cultural and historical significance. In addition to art and design history, his syntax is sourced from his daily life and surroundings in Contemporary London. “Windows and doors that I pass on the street, the world I inhabit, provide me with an index of images to abstract into my paintings”. What Ellis creates amounts to a subversion of historical referencing, or codified language system that questions notions of symbolism and authenticity and appears to defy chronological or cultural classification.

Collections

The Saatchi Collection, The Glenfiddich Collection, Swiss Life and various public and private collections in Europe, Asia and USA .

Education

2006-09 Post Graduate Diploma Fine Art, The Royal Academy Schools, London.

2000-03 BA (Hons) Fine Art, John Moores, Liverpool.

Latest solo exhibitions

2023 Echoes in the Sky, Pia Ortuno and Tim Ellis, FOLD Gallery, London

2023 Loose Lips...... Sinks Ships, University Centre Hastings, Hastings

2021 In Bloom, JGM Gallery, London

2019 Tomorrow's Harvest, FOLD Gallery, London

2018 Solo Presentation, Art Rotterdam, Van Nelle Fabriek, Rotterdam

2018 Cypher, PAPER Gallery, Manchester