Tim Brawner (b. 1991 in Omaha, NE; Based in NY) produces a practice of painting that mines the space between the uncanny and the grotesque. Seeking to produce in the viewer a compelling affect of unease, Brawner utilizes the idiom of illustration to render images of alienation through the purposeful bricolage of disparate representational elements.

In each work, a persistently fine, painterly execution meets the artist’s formal drafting process of drawing and montage to achieve what Brawner terms a pathos of ‘weirdness’: a form of defamiliarization which is also a seduction, an entreat, into a strange representational space nonetheless evoking trepidation and dread. These visual chimeras undermine the spectators’ traditional binary frames of reference, eliding at once those of conservative Western Christian morality and those of liberal secular paradigms of Enlightened empathy.

Tim Brawner was born in 1991 in Omaha, NE, and lives in Brooklyn, New York. He received his MFA from the Yale School of Art in New Haven, CT (2020) and his BFA from Nebraska Wesleyan University in Lincoln, NE (2014).

Brawner has mounted solo exhibitions at Management in New York City, NY (2023); Union Pacific in London, UK (2019); and PAGE in New York City, NY (2017).

He has been included in group exhibitions such as OMGWTF at Primary Projects in Miami, FL (2021); No Fear In Trying at Unit London in London, UK (2021); Companions at Union Pacific in London, UK (2021); Urgent at Papa Projects in Minneapolis, MN (2021); C.H.A.D. at Ashes / Ashes, New York City, NY (2020); and Yale Painting & Printmaking MFA at Galerie Perrotin in New York City, NY (2020) among others.