Dallas/Ft Worth

It’s 1992 at Glasgow School of Art. A seven-foot-by-six-foot painting that portrays a thick, fleshy female nude, subtly snarling and sitting on a pedestal, towers above visitors to an undergraduate exhibition.

In the Kimbell Art Museum’s Renzo Piano Pavilion, 58 ancient marble sculptures—some gods, others emperors, still others ordinary Romans—stand in commanding silence, carrying with them the weight of centuries.

In Timothy Harding’s paintings, there’s a kind of friction at play, a low hum between precision and improvisation, between gesture and grid, between what is seen and what is suggested.

Stop reading for a second and close your eyes. What do you see?

Sometimes the final act brings resolution and neatly ties up an epic tale. Sometimes the final act leaves little resolution and gives an opening for a follow-up, or nothing at all.