Tim Kent paints the city at rest in ‘Sojourn’ at Hollis Taggart

Tim Kent’s new paintings show people asleep, worn out or caught in the disoriented pause after arriving somewhere new.

His show “Sojourn” opened September 10 at Hollis Taggart in New York and runs through October 17.

The gallery said the show follows three exhibitions about the process of art-making — artists at work, canvases in transit, the business behind the picture — and turns instead to what happens when that stops.

Its subjects are city dwellers in a private, in-between state: exhausted, suspended, briefly out from under the pressures of work, media and money.

“It’s about giving yourself permission not to be productive,” Kent said in the exhibition’s press materials. “These are paintings about people who live in cities and understand the value of rest. They’re not escaping forever — they’re simply stepping away long enough to breathe.”

One work, Passy, is a blue-toned painting of a woman asleep beside a man on a terrace, newly arrived. “Anyone who travels knows that feeling,” Kent said.

Another, Manhattan, shows a woman in a black dress worn out in the middle of what looks like a celebration.

Kent said he kept the paintings apart from current events and meant them as individual moments of escape rather than commentary. Any sense of helplessness in them is a byproduct, not the point, he said.

He also called the show inseparable from New York, a city he said keeps people constantly working, moving and producing.

“I keep saying the exhibition is about rest after the dizziness,” Kent said. “I think almost everyone living in New York understands exactly what that feels like.”

Kent said the work also marks a change in how he paints.

“I’m moving away from a very analytical kind of image-making, one that leaned on the language of digital surveillance, toward something much more human,” he said.

“It’s a shift from digital mapping, digital projections, mechanistic systems — into something more natural and instinctive. And I’m simplifying things a lot more now.”

He tied the change to a growing exhaustion with technology. “I didn’t want to keep making paintings that just reiterate that visual language. I’m rejecting it, politically, to some degree,” Kent said. “I think what I’m trying to do is get to a place where the painting is interesting, not the technology.”

Kent was born in Vancouver in 1975 and lives in Brooklyn. A first-generation American of Turkish and British descent, he trained in perspective painting and has held solo shows at JD Malat Gallery in London and Dubai, Pilevneli Gallery in Istanbul, Slag Gallery in New York and Patrick Mikhail Gallery in Montreal.

His paintings are held by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Beijing; the 21c Museum in Louisville, Kentucky; and the Rockwell Museum in Corning, New York.

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