Alan Davie - Recent Paintings

Alan Davie was born in Grangemouth, Scotland, in 1920, and studied at Edinburgh College of Art from 1937-40. He had his first solo exhibition in 1950 at Gimpel Fils, and throughout his career has distinguished himself as one of the finest British abstract painters of his generation. Alan Davie's oeuvre defies definitive categorisation. Paralleling the developments of American Abstract Expressionism, influenced by Modernist primitivist art, and with an attachment to a distinctly 'Celtic' spirit, his work is an individual exploration of universal wisdoms. In his recent paintings such as Celtic Game, 1999, Davie's bold, saturated colours act as a stabilizing feature, as his interest in the geometric, abstract and figurative form is played out. Simultaneously, Davie's love of improvised jazz informs the looser spontaneous gestural brushstrokes of Starlight Dance, 2001. This exhibition brings together large scale and smaller intimate works produced during the last three years that bare testament to Davie's continued vigour and commitment to the act of painting. These new works experiment with, and merge his love of jazz, mythology and mysticism, to create free flowing expressions of his creative spirit. The Tao Zen tradition that has meant much to Davie has enabled him to build his own symbolic pictorial language including wheels, stars, snakes and crosses. His recent interest in the Venezuelan artist Barbaros Rivas has led to an unprecedented series of figurative landscape paintings. Throughout these new ventures and investigations Alan Davie's work retains an atmosphere of spontaneity and exhilaration, whilst he continues to search for spiritual and mystical enlightenment. He sums up his artistic practice by saying: 'Images are not made as art objects but as channels of communion with the divine'. Alan Davie has exhibited widely, with recent shows at The Barbican Art Gallery, London (1993), The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh (1997), COBRA Museum, Amstelveen (2001). His work can be found in numerous international public collections including Tate Modern, London, The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, Museum of Modern Art, New York, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, and Museu de Arte Contemporanea, São Paulo. Pressetext

Alan Davie - Recent Paintings