Timothy Gatenby’s paintings of nostalgic cartoon characters humorously deconstruct pop culture and are rendered with a painterly quality more associated with the esteem of Fine Art than the amusement of light entertainment. Familiar characters, known for being brightly colored and fun, are depicted as blurred with washed out hues; their smooth cartoon-like surfaces represented as textured and grayed.

The usually jovial characters of popular television are stripped of their bright, happy personalities, and on them something much more sinister is superimposed. Often overweight or under the influence of drugs, it as if the characters have over indulged, like culture itself they are addicted to fast living and immediate gratification. All the while, throughout the various styles and themes that Gatenby explores, small idiosyncratic moments crop up, where, as if for his own amusement as much as anybody else’s, a joke or a pun is given expression through a depicted object seen out of place, or an expectation subverted by an oddity, giving the work a touch of the absurd.  

In recent years Gatenby’s work has been selected for the Columbia Threadneedle Prize Exhibition (2018), BP Portrait Prize (2012) and the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition (2019, 2012).

www.timothygatenby.com/