Timothy Gatenby 'The Lord Of Kirby' Original Available

Artist: Timothy Gatenby
Title: The Lord Of Kirby
Medium: Airbrush on Paper
Size: 14 x 14 Inches
Edition: UNIQUE
Price: £250

Timothy Gatenby is a London-based figurative painter who fuses Renaissance glazing with pop-culture satire to probe modern idolatry. Born in 1986, he first studied film at Queen Mary University, analysing Herzog and Tarkovsky, then spent five years at Florence’s Charles Cecil Studios mastering the sight-size method, an optical technique that trains the eye to translate minute shifts of light into form. This rigorous grounding surfaces in his canvases: portraits and still-lifes built from dozens of translucent oil and air-brushed layers that glow like sixteenth-century panels seen through neon glass.

Gatenby selects universally recognisable subjects Michelangelo’s David, Warhol’s Coke bottle, Disney princesses, and various pop culture characters then renders them in soft, almost out-of-focus focus, as if recalled from a half-remembered dream. The blur evokes digital fatigue and the erosion of collective memory, asking whether a streaming childhood icon carries the same mnemonic weight as a five-hundred-year-old sculpture. Fast-food wrappers, Evian bottles and cartoon heroes are elevated onto velvet-dark pedestals, equating classical marble with mass-produced plastic to critique consumerist fetish. Despite the conceptual heft, the paintings pulse with dry British humour: a cherub clutches a vape pen, Belle and the Beast binge Netflix, cherubs selfie-stick their way into heaven.

Recent solo show And All Shall Be Memorialised at Blond Contemporary (2025) pairs antiquity and advertising as co-equal cultural totems, underscoring Gatenby’s belief that nostalgia now attaches as fiercely to soda logos as to Laocoön. Finalist in the 2012 BP Portrait Prize, he continues to dissect how images become relics, producing hyper-real relics for an age when icons are streamed, scrolled and instantly replaced.