LOS ANGELES, CA.- DENK gallery is presenting new and recent works by Los Angeles-based artist Tim Ebner in Metal Paintings. The geometric Finish-Fetish inspired pieces of the late 80s for which Ebner received international attention, gave way to subsequent bodies of representational painting and sculpture and later forays into painterly abstraction. The artist's newest work combines the formal concision of his earlier interest in Minimalism with the material-rigor of craft to produce sculptural paintings in an expanded field.

Technically informed by his experience working with Blacksmiths at a forge, Ebner's recent pieces are physical exertions, bent, hammered and shaped from 26 gauge cold roll steel, an industrial sheet metal the artist later finishes in glassy urethane. These works, produced through a physically demanding and substantially resistant process, function both pictorially as two-dimensional surfaces contained by the proposition of an implied frame, and plastically as three-dimensional objects in space. Ebner views the mutability of abstraction as a freeing alternative to the constraints of representation and narrative, focusing on the continued refinement of his process and technique to produce increasingly nuanced material results.

In Metal Paintings, Ebner is presenting a new suite of 'hammered' textile works alongside those in steel. Similarly executed but in materials that yield differently, these fabric surfaces in velvet and canvas capture the ephemerality of impact as a trace rather than a dimension and produce a different spatial experience of the object altogether.

Tim Ebner attended the California College of Arts and Crafts and received a BFA and an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 1982. He has taught at CalArts, Otis College of Art and Design, Occidental College, Claremont College, UCLA, Art Center College of Art & Design, and is currently a professor at California State University, Los Angeles.

Ebner's work has appeared in exhibitions since 1982, and has been shown in several National institutions including, the New Museum, NY, Museum of Contemporary Art, LA, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, List Visual Art Center, MIT, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston and Museum of Fine Art, and Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The artist lives in Los Angeles.