JD Malat Gallery Dubai presents Tim Kent’s solo exhibition Horsepower, a body of work that revisits one of humanity’s most enduring symbols: the horse. Across large-scale paintings and imagined spaces, the Brooklyn-based artist explores the horse’s profound role in shaping art, technology, and human ambition — from ancient cave walls to the engines of modernity.
For millennia, horses have carried not only bodies and goods but also meaning. They have appeared in art from Mesopotamia and Egypt to the canvases of Leonardo da Vinci, George Stubbs, Edgar Degas, and Rosa Bonheur — emblems of vitality, discipline, and dominance. In Kent’s interpretation, this lineage extends into the industrial and digital eras: the very term “horsepower,” coined by James Watt, ties organic strength to the myth of technological progress.
Kent’s Horsepower transforms this layered history into a contemporary visual dialogue. His canvases blend Renaissance perspective with modern abstraction, creating compositions that oscillate between architecture and dream. Works such as Titan, 300 HP, Pegasus, and Trojan trace the evolving relationship between power and imagination — from the mythical to the mechanical, the heroic to the industrial. The titles themselves, also used for rocket systems in space and military technologies, point to an unsettling continuum: horsepower as both measure and metaphor for humanity’s relentless drive toward advancement.
Through these works, Kent examines systems of value — the ways we quantify effort, progress, and ambition. His painterly spaces act as speculative terrains where past and present merge, urging viewers to question how the symbols of mastery and motion endure in new forms.
In Horsepower, the horse becomes more than subject; it becomes a mirror reflecting the paradoxes of modernity. What once symbolized grace and endurance now carries echoes of acceleration, conquest, and loss. By translating this ancient figure into a contemporary idiom, Kent invites reflection on how human aspiration — whether expressed through muscle, machine, or myth — continues to define our collective imagination.
