Tim Kent's 'Histories in Flux' Exhibition Merges Military Tech with Art History at JD Malat Gallery

Tim Kent's solo exhibition 'Histories in Flux' at JD Malat Gallery in London runs from 2 May to 1 June 2024. The series integrates digital calculation and military targeting aesthetics into painting, challenging historical narratives and surveillance regimes. Works like 'Odalisque' (2023), 'Inclinations' (2024), and 'The Reproduction's Gaze' (2024) reimagine Ingres's 'La Grande Odalisque' (1814) through a painted dot-matrix, blending neoclassical motifs with contemporary digital visualization. Other pieces, such as 'Procession' (2024) and 'Past Again and Again' (2024), reference Giorgio de Chirico's metaphysical painting, disrupting coherent time and space with vector graphics and oil textures. 'Menagerie' (2024) places a Winged Victory of Samothrace statue in Castle Howard, an English Baroque country house, while 'Archive II' (2023) features a transparent, falling horse sculpture rotated via CAD-like methods across multiple paintings. Kent critiques algorithms and biased datasets, drawing parallels to Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky's 1970s research on memory and judgment. The artist aims to 'assault' history by dismantling progress cults tied to neoliberalism, as seen in 'By Careful Design' (2024), which depicts anonymous figures in a neoclassical boardroom. The exhibition retrofits painting with digital forms to question future imaginaries and data-driven life reductions.