Harvey, Doug. "The Bish, The Fish and The Fantastic Four: Ginny Bishton, Tim Ebner, and Mark Todd," LA Weekly, January 20, 2010.
Another L.A. artist whose oeuvre has been characterized by sudden stylistic about-faces is painter Tim Ebner, who rose to renown in the late '80s with minimalist geometric neo–Finish-Fetish assemblages produced in a surfboard factory. In the early '90s, he abandoned this successful marketing niche for a series of awkwardly rendered clown portraits and anthropomorphic animals crashing through the surf. Into the '00s these pictorial scenarios underwent only incremental change, but Ebner's painterly technique grew in leaps and bounds — a fact that became evident when in 2007 he suddenly began producing a flurry of loose, colorful abstract paintings and atmospheric minimalist landscapes. It seemed that Ebner had come full circle, returning to "serious" painting and a nonfigurative visual vocabulary that might easily take another decade to work through.
Which only makes his current exhibition at Rosamund Felsen that much more laugh-out-loud funny. Mounted high onto metal brackets jutting from the gallery wall, Ebner's newest body of work consists of scroll-cut plywood forms in the shapes of exotic fish, resurfaced with what appear to be fragments of canvas from his gestural abstractions, amended with bulging Sculpey-blob eyes and lips, clusters of peacock and pheasant feathers, costume-jewelry baubles and occasional unlikely materials like bread and vacu-formed faux-marble Jacuzzi acrylic. Ridiculous and delightful, these cut-and-paste creatures of the deep nevertheless showcase Ebner's now-masterful painting chops in a way that is simultaneously art-historically infused and unpretentious as you can get. East Coaster C.K. Wilde's impossibly intricate collage renderings of an iconic galloping-horse silhouette — on view in Felsen's project room — are an appropriate match, though they only hint at the social engagement and breadth of Wilde's other work, much of which is made entirely out of cut-up paper currency.
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 Pagel, David. "Teach a man to paint a fish.....," The Los Angeles Times, Fri Jan 15, 2010, pp. D22-23 (reproductions).
Abstract paintings come in all sizes but not many shapes. That's because if a painter wants to be taken seriously, he's expected to stick to the regular format, squares and rectangles, throwing in an occasional circle or oval when he wants to get wild.
Tim Ebner's new works take the notion of shaped paintings far beyond these parameters, making them seem silly and not nearly as ambitious as his terrifically eccentric paintings, which are shaped like exotic fish.
To step into Rosamund Felsen Gallery is to immerse yourself in a world of luscious color, exuberant brush strokes and fish of all shapes and stripes.
It's great fun and, like lots of the 56-year-old artist's 21 solo shows in Los Angeles over the last 28 years, an unexpected departure that attests to Ebner's inventiveness and his unwillingness to stick to a tried and true style.
Each of Ebner's two dozen fish is unlike any other. All are canvas on panel. The shapes of some are realistic. Others are imaginary. Many are adorned with feathers, beads and baubles, as well as antennae-style wires and fake eyelashes. One is made of bread. Another wears glasses.
All are mounted on rusty metal bars that extend from a few inches to more than four feet from the walls. This makes the festive fish seem to be swimming in midair. All are dolled up with carefully placed lumps of Sculpy, an easy-to-use modeling compound that causes many of Ebner's rainbow-colored fish to appear to have collagen-enhanced lips, surgically improved cheekbones and Botox-smoothed brows. Think Palm Springs meets Pixar, by way of a precocious kid's coloring book.
And that's just the beginning. Ebner's freewheeling brushwork steals the show. It's messy without being muddled; energized without being expressive; forceful yet free of the pompous bombast so common to much improvised abstraction. 400.TE_10_gallery-2
Part of Ebner's originality has to do with his palette, a delicious mixture of organic and unnatural tints. But most of it has to do with the stark contrast between the juicy fluidity of his promiscuously mixed pigments and the crisp contours of his fishes' silhouettes, each neatly cut with a jigsaw. Some outlines are graceful and sinuous, just like real fish.
Others are goofy and cartoon, just like real fish. Still others are zany and make-believe, unlike anything in the real world.
This body of work began when Ebner got bored painting on flat surfaces.
To throw himself a curve, he dug a hole in his backyard and filled it with cement. When the cement dried, he dug up the rough, spherical lump, set it on a table in his studio and stretched canvases over it.
Painting over a 3-D form was sufficiently disorienting to free Ebner from lazy habits. It allowed him to see things with fresh eyes. The next step, of cutting his canvases into fish shapes, has no logical explanation. It's just Ebner's hyperactive imagination making a leap, a leap of faith that does not worry about going off the deep end but delights in the discoveries to be found there.
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 Rosamund Felsen Gallery Press Release, January, 2010.
With flourishes of color and an insatiable desire for experimentation in his process, Tim Ebner has come up with a fantastic new series of works, playing at the edges of what painting can be. With bursts of color, and a free, spirited brush, he brings us an amazing school of fish. These fish jump out of frames and off the walls, popping and splashing beyond any traditional sense of painting. In a vigorous and process-oriented practice, Ebner has devised a method for precisely combining his painting on canvas with wood that has been cut and shaped to the drawn outlines of all sorts of fish. The liberation of moving out of the frame doesn't stop there though, as Ebner adds sculpted flourishes to build up the fish eyes and lips with feathers, clay, and jewelry. This is a school of fish unlike any we have seen before.
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 Rosamund Felsen Gallery Press Release, 2008
Rosamund Felsen Gallery is pleased to present a series of new work by Tim Ebner. Over the past decade, Ebner’s oeuvre has become known for works that engage the strange possibilities of painting, blending the medium’s naturalistic and imaginative impulses. In these works Ebner is investigating levels of abstraction though reduction. He returns to the motif of the ocean by exploring the boundaries of limitation in the production process. A vast symbol of the unconscious, reflecting and engulfing our dreams and desires, the ocean in Ebner’s canvases is a stage for transference and self-reflection. An invocation of faith in the unknown and the journey to discover.
Please join us for the artist’s reception on Saturday, April 5, 2008 from 5 – 7 pm.
Gallery hours are 10-5:30, Tuesday-Saturday.
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 Rosamund Felsen Gallery Press Release, 2006
For immediate release:
The upcoming exhibition at Rosamund Felsen Gallery will be:
Tim Ebner
Jan 6 - Feb 3, 2007
Rosamund Felsen Gallery is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of Tim Ebner’s new paintings. Ebner had almost decided to go to taxidermy school when the full-size, stuffed grizzly bear that he was using as a model had to be returned to its owner for a cocktail party. Then a friend brought him a taxidermied monkey on a pole to replace it. While the drama of his previous animal paintings leaned on a haunting anthropomorphism, and the unmistakable weight of traditional portraiture, in these new paintings Ebner’s passion for rendering the exquisite detail of the ‘real thing’ emerges from a field of painterly starts, stops, erasures and reconfigurations. Finally ‘face to face’ with the animals, Ebner returns from his post-surrealist reverie to wrestle through a deeply materialist commitment to painting.
Please join us for the artist’s reception on Sat. January 6, 2007 from 5-7pm.
Gallery hours are 10-5:30, Tuesday-Saturday.
For more information please contact Edward Sterrett at 310.828.8488
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 at Newport Harbor Art Museum by Lane Relyea for catalogue essay
Where do these paintings come from?
Same place as everything else. Out of nowhere. From deep outer space. From out of a crack in the ocean’s floor. From a showroom on Melrose Avenue. Actually, I’m told they’re produced at a surfboard factory in Marina del Rey. So I drive out there to see for myself. Along the way, two images flash through my mind: one is of a classic factory, workers on an assembly line manning levers and toggle switches in a hug box-shaped building, the air thick with exhaust and the pulsing of heavy machinery; the other is very different, it’s Andy Warhol’s factory, an enclave of would-be celebrities, casual chatter floating above the low drone of late-‘60’s cabaret rock, cigarette smoke draped in mid-air; the carnival atmosphere foreshadowing the kind of hip ‘80’s workplace depicted on such shows as “L.A. Law.” Both preconceptions, however, prove to me way off: I arrive to find a small room with no machinery, just a couple of guys in bathing suits and bandanas standing over long wooden trays, pouring laminate onto Styrofoam boards the shape of oversized tongue depressors.
What’s wrong with this picture? Despite the lack of machines, this still feels like a factory in what now seems an old-fashioned sense—it’s about production, about real work, about the forging of raw materials into products for everyday use. With their perfectly even coloring, their meticulously smoothed and glossy finishes, it’s obvious that a whole lot of pride has been taken in the fine crafting of these objects—both Tim Ebner’s paintings and the surfboards. But neither is too finely crafted, too fanciful and precious. Instead, they have been stamped by their labor with a traditional morality and a humbleness. That is, they appear as the result of an “honest day’s work.” The forms of these objects, more often than not, are multiple—made in bulk—and not unique; their colors are public and familiar, of the government-issue or factory-showroom type; and they are made not from antiquated materials, like oil paint, but from prosaic industrial ones—acrylic, resin, fiberglass, zolatone. Their brand of honesty lies in the straightforward, no-nonsense approach and in their wanting to be like everything else, plain and popular.
But—with Ebner’s paintings in particular—there’s another, sadder truth to them as well. For more labor has gone into them than could ever be read back out as content. This is how they own up, how Ebner’s paintings seek to be true to their times. Because what could be said of them, it seems, could very easily be said of production, of Western industrialism, in general. And that is, as his paintings make obvious, Tim Ebner has definitely gotten lost in his work.
Within the mythology of Work—in which modern painting enthusiastically participates, and into which Ebner’s paintings fall, backwards and shadowlike—this is profanity. Work is never misleading, never obscure. Just the opposite—it is always clear and affirmative, fully accountable and wholly self-evident. More than creative, it aspires to being a productive force, a labor whose purpose is to be useful. No matter if the labor is fully disciplined as in Seurat or Mondrian, or even Kenneth Noland—a refined craft or skill, which reads in painting as knowledge, as technique “perfected into a science” – or if it is undisciplined, as in Pollock or Kline—a passionate outburst, which reads as liberation and freedom, a “working beyond” restrictive conventions—work, in this sense, is always active and progressive and, above all, it is economical. The same goes for painting as it does for industry: minimum input should result in maximum visibility. From this kind of work comes material fact, positive values, and “good” meaning. And what gets eliminated in the process is everything that is wasteful and counterproductive: exotica, indirect reference, allusion, literariness, all the refuse in marking a decadent art.
And yet, despite the all the effort that’s gone into them, Ebner’s paintings lack any of the work’s positive qualities. They have gone far beyond being things worked-over to become instead things over-worked, so obsessed with the means of their production that they have lost all track of that production’s end. Or perhaps Ebner’s production has no end. As his paintings have grown increasingly resined and lacquered in the last two years, they recall more and more what Roland Barthes once said of plastic, that it is “in essence the stuff of alchemy…less a thing than the trace of a movement.” Work does not leave its mark, does not declare itself in Ebner’s paintings—rather, it gets absorbed. The image of work is itself worked on, its hardness and certainty broken down, extended, made soft and gummy, and given over to endless processing and transformation. It’s this sense of indeterminacy that Ebner reinforces when, in such works as the “Color Cue” paintings from 1986 and his very latest pieces, he presents his paintings in component parts, thereby suggesting infinite possibilities for their rearrangement. Never in a final state, Ebner’s paintings know only many states, a variety of extreme conditions: seen in an endless array of guises, chameleonlike and ultimately unknowable, Ebner’s image of work sheds its ethical overtones to become something much more akin to a Symbolist motif—at times ghostly, at time impenetrable, its is always sensational and exotic, perverse and mesmerizing.
It there a name we can give to this strange form of labor, this blue collar version of the magician’s act? In works from the mid-‘80’s, such as the “LAICA” paintings, Ebner used a resist process to produce images of brushstrokes that weren’t actually there. But now, in his very latest paintings, he has refined this stunt, cutting down its long, drawn-out gymnastics. Now Ebner buffs. Buffing is his new mystery—it is an invisible labor, a job that aims at its own erasure that is complete only when it can no longer be detected. Fittingly, it was exactly this kind of labor that I remember seeing most solemnly performed at the surfboard factory, where objects were prepared for their destination in the sea, a world of endless process, a world where there are no indelible marks or lasting statements.
By the same token, it also seems fitting that the objects Ebner has most recently taken to buffing—his newest paintings exhibited here—are modeled after the acoustic panels that now line the insides of many freeway underpasses in Southern California, whose purpose, like the act of buffing is to “produce” silence.
While driving back from the surfboard factory on the 10, I pass one of the many traffic message display boards, that, like the acoustic panels, distinguish L.A.’s freeway-system from all others, that prove the advanced stage of its development. But like the acoustic panels, and like Ebner’s paintings as well, the message board is essentially a contradiction—a technological achievement pointing the way toward its own undoing, a means of communication bent on silence. Today, like most days, the message it spells out is concerned and helpful, but also reads as something pathological, even suicidal, a hinting at its own negation.
“SMOG ALERT,” it tells its audience of freeway-users. And then this: “REDUCE DRIVING.”
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 at John Michael Kohler Arts Center by
David Pagel for exhibition essay
Tim Ebner’s beautifully painted pictures of anthropomorphic animals fly in the face F. Scott Fitzgerald’s claim that American lives have no second acts. Not only do Ebner’s enigmatic paintings of strangely humanized animals suggest open-ended narratives, with seemingly infinite potential for diverse, even contradictory interpretations, but his approach to his career demonstrates that life cannot be contained in a one-act drama.
Ebner’s figurative images represent the second act of his own career. Upon receiving a graduate degree from California Institute of the Arts in 1982, the young artist swiftly developed an international reputation for his abstract, minimalist-inspired panels, masterfully crafted from a variety of slick, synthetic materials. Throughout the 1980’s, Ebner exhibited series after series of glossy, fiberglass planks and commercially produced discs of swirled resin that were celebrated as hip, up-to-the-minute critiques of conventional abstract paintings. These postmodern painterly surrogates garnered critical acclaim and were embraced by collectors and curators for using the techniques and materials of light industry to refer to such works for the 1960s Finish Fetish school, one of the first Southern California art movements to gain national attention.
In 1991, Ebner suddenly stopped making abstract works, abruptly closing the curtain on his career’s first act and bravely setting out to do something different. He has explained that at the time, he felt that “If I had any minutes left in my allotment of the 15 minutes of fame, you can have them. It’s too much pressure. You lose friends and your life becomes really anxious. I spent most of the money I had making art so it was a very productive time. I bought a house. But there is something insatiable about it. It came too quickly and it blew everything out of proportion. When I look back, I have no nostalgia about it at all. Meeting people, traveling, anxiety about shows, the jealously, good riddance.”
Cool, impersonal, and somewhat tongue in check, Ebner’s abstract works from the 1980’s matched the attitude that dominated the decade, when the international art market flourished and art stars were born. But ultimately he wasn’t satisfied: “[Those works] were about a certain attitude—about process, materials and the work of the 60’s—you could go on and on [outlining their historical references and intellectual maneuvers]. It became really boring to me. I could talk about industrial usages transplanted to an art context. But the real aspirations of abstraction, I wasn’t comfortable with at all. [Painters like] Mondrian had a conviction about abstraction. I wanted [my work] to be about the spiritual aspirations of the abstractionists, but I don’t have the intellect for that. I’m a little quirkier.”
After struggling through two series of awkwardly unresolved paintings of loosely rendered monsters interspersed with handsomely pattern geometric forms, Ebner painted a breakthrough body of work, whose wild animals resemble children’s book illustrations. Poignant, touching, and utterly sincere, these figurative works pursue goals very similar to those of the abstractionists Ebner admires, albeit in a style all their own. Stoic poise, absolute trust, utter befuddlement, fearful panic, benign guile, gentle absurdity, and desperate hopefulness are only some of the human attributes the animals in these paintings convey. Throughout, Ebner’s subjects exhibit a consciousness usually foreign to the animal realm.
Rooted in the sphere of the imagination, Ebner’s paintings embody and existential outlook, which not only includes second acts, but is predicated on starting over, fully conscious of the possibilities lost when the first act is ended. In terms of subject matter, his images depict attempts to begin again—if not completely anew, then at least with fresh possibilities. These are classic, aftermath paintings: Each takes shape in the wake of a momentous—often tragic—event, after substantial losses have been endured, yet before life has settled into a comfortably numbing rhythm that makes its miraculous nature seem mundane and uninteresting.
His various beasts, clowns and toy soldiers are often endowed with human hands and eyes that reveal remarkable depths of feeling. The psychological terrain on which these deeply romantic works unfold combines the epic with the fanciful. If a children’s book fused the storyline of Noah’s ark with that of the “Titanic”—if the ancient scribes and modern screenwriters of these popular tales collaborated to create a single, streamlined story—Ebner’s paintings would be well suited to illustrate the narrative.
Both the biblical story and the recent movie begin with ships and passengers, continue with difficult journeys filled with uncertainty and despair, and end as parables about sin and redemption. Both combine great losses of life with tremendous gains in maturity and wisdom for a drastically smaller number of blessed—or lucky—survivors. Both stories also follow before-and-after structures, dividing themselves into two parts easily broken down into first and second acts. And finally, both parables end with fresh starts: After passing through extreme hardship, Noah’s family begins the difficult task of building a new community; similarly, after a tragic loss of her innocence and her companions, the heroine of “Titanic” starts a new life in the New World.
Ebner’s paintings tell tales of tentative beginnings that follow in the immediate aftermath of an implied, life-defining event. Most of the painter’s animal pictures are set on the seashore. The lions, horses, wolves, and hyenas in Ebner’s misplaced menagerie stand in what that either reaches up to their midsections or crashes over their shoulders in white capped waves, giving visual form to the precariousness of their situations. Cast adrift, these self-conscious creatures find themselves in predicaments that invite views to imagine that, prior to what we see in the paintings, an ark like vessel foundered and sank, leaving its animal cargo to sink or swim. Views enter the stories well before the floodwaters have receded and just before the beasts’ arrival on dry land, where new homes, and new lives, might be built.
True to the story of the art, Ebner’s images do not depict more than two beasts from any species. Almost all of his paintings focus on intimate, tension-riddled relationships between individual creatures from different species, which in nature would confront one another as hunter and prey. Time and again, large green fish are grasped by bears or tenderly held by wolves with human hands. In Ebner’s whimsical world, ponies stroll with lions’ arms casually thrown over their shoulders, a horse rests its head on a brown bear’s shoulder, a hyena nestles into the arms of a grizzly bear, and an orange alligator sniffs a waterlilly. Plus, all the animals were an odd assortment of human clothing, including old-fashioned top hats, clowns’ striped caps, farmers’ straw hats, sailors’ rain slickers, monks’ robes and an impressive range of military regalia. These quirky outfits emphasize that their wearers are misfits—not generic examples of their species but oddballs who do not fit into the workaday world.
Much of the melancholy embodied by Ebner’s paintings derived from the implied separation of the ark’s carefully painted animals; individual creatures are alone in the world, separated from partners who share their experiences. Each cluster or mismatched pair of animals appears to have forged an ad hoc alliance with one of its antagonists in nature. It is as if the members of Ebner’s menagerie have determined that their chances for survival are better if they stick together—even if it means going against their natural inclinations. Driven by dire straits, the improvised relationships among many of the animals seem to be charged with uneasiness, even dread, while others are suffused with a sweet sense of camaraderie, which could easily be mistaken for love.
Only one canvas, the artist’s largest, depicts two members of the same species. Standing waist deep in the surf, a male and female lion scan the horizon as if they were within walking distance of a beach. Showing great caution and patience, they also look as if they grown too accustomed to tragic mishaps to go ashore with the naïve hope that life there will be safer or more hospitable than life at sea.
The against-the-grain behavior exhibited by Ebner’s animals reflects the artist’s own willingness to turn his back on a decade of successful abstract paintings, abandoning an approach that came easily to him and embarking on the risky path that led to his figurative work. As a painter, he says, “You kind of work with your inadequacies and you invent from that. You are always fighting and making compromises and that repetition you invent.”
The improbable combinations of wild animals with human hands, clothes and flowers that appear in his paintings come from a hotchpotch of sources, including children’s nature books, secular paintings, gardening manuals, and religious images, from which many of the hand gestures derive. In one picture, a bear wears a hat drawn from a John Singer Sargeant painting while its hands are copied from the figure of Jesus in El Greco’s “El Espolio.” Ebner’s works appeal more strongly to intuition than to reason. Their emotionally loaded evocations elude verbal description. He has explained, “It’s a combination of logic and perverseness, the tension between [the] formal elements in a painting and the strange possibilities…I could almost explain away the early work. With these, I can’t do that. As soon as I try to intellectualize them, they are gone. It’s like they are in contact with a higher source—maybe that’s a metaphor for what I hope the experience of painting would be like. That is very romantic, but maybe that is all you have in a way.
Like the animals in his pictures, who try on new lives in an unfamiliar world, Ebner’s career exemplifies the idea that people only discover who they are when they struggle through difficult situations or do what does not come easily. His abbreviated pieces of theater compress a wide range of emotions, associations and memories into two dimensions, where they demonstrate that second acts—and second efforts—are sometimes more telling than first ones.
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 at Rosamund Felsen Gallery by Christopher Knight of
The Los Angeles Times
There is no earthly reason that Tim Ebner’s animal paintings should be so captivating. But they are – and not because Ebner is a gifted naturalist, but because he is a gifted un-naturalist. The lions and tigers in several new works at Rosamund Felsen Gallery are abstract in the way things like energy, spirit and liveliness are abstract. He paints his creatures in a realist style, but their contexts shift our interpretation.
The large canvases in the front gallery continue a direction from Ebner’s last solo show, three years ago. Animals cavort in the surf at the beach – Mr. and Mrs. Lion on vacation, the Tiger family on holiday, mugging for the folks back home as if in tourist snapshots. The subtle compositions project an air of recognizable human play, but absent the condescension that accompanies anthropomorphic tricks like putting party hats on dogs or pantaloons on a monkey.
The most compelling paintings are the four in the rear gallery, where the life-size animals are painted within lush fields of pure, vivid color – mottled cerulean, bright crimson, deep sapphire. Their fur quietly reflects these atmospheric colors (or their complementary hues), smuggling violet, greens and chrome-yellow into the bejeweled mix. One result is a celebratory sense of consecration. Another is the invocation of purely visual power, which envelops these creatures like a force field.
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 at Rosamund Felsen Gallery by Eve Wood of Artnet.com
Tim Ebner's exquisite paintings of big cats are assaultingly gorgeous, and act on the senses from every possible angle all at once, engaging humor and false pathos at the intersection of our imaginations. Ebner's cats pose at high tide on sultry afternoons, and may seem even to rival the famous image of Burt Lancaster in From Here To Eternity, though unlike Lancaster's excessive seduction in the grips of white tide, Ebner's cats seem to know the limits of their own desire, distinctly aware of their prowess and strength. In Untitled (Lioness), a young lioness extends the full length of her body in repose across a frothy shore. One paw extended, she knows exactly how to win our hearts.
The show is divided into two bodies of work that are obviously connected. While the lions and tigers in the first room frolic in white water, the tigers in the second room are more deliberately painted and hold the empty spaces around their bodies with the sheer force of presence and expression. In Untitled (Two Tigers On Cerulean Field), two cats gaze out at us, one seemingly caught mid-sneeze or mid-yawn, while the other stands statuesque above. The effect is like that of family portrait where the patriarch doesn't know his son stands behind him making bunny ears, proving that even the majestic fall temporarily away from themselves.
EVE WOOD is an artist and writer who lives in Los Angeles. Her new book of poetry, Love's Funeral, is published by Cherry Grove Collections
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