Horizons: Dallas Contemporary
Dallas Contemporary is pleased to present a major solo exhibition with new works by British contemporary artist Ian Davenport for the upcoming season. Curated by the museum’s executive director, Peter Doroshenko, the exhibition will feature pieces from the artist’s latest body of work alongside a selection of paintings created over the course of the last 30 years. Opening September 30th, 2018, and running through March at Dallas Contemporary, the show coincides with Colourscapes, an exhibition of new paintings opening this fall at Waddington Custot in London.
Born in 1966, Ian Davenport has come to prominence on an international scale for his abstract explorations of line, color, and the quality of chance as it relates to the inherent materiality of paint. He received early recognition as an artist from his participation in Freeze, a student-curated exhibition in London Docklands in 1988, which showcased the work of students from Goldsmiths’ College of Art and who would later come to be known as the YBAs (Young British Artists). The forthcoming exhibition at Dallas Contemporary will include not only a piece from that initial period of Davenport’s investigations into paint as medium (Paint Pot, 1988), but also presents work spanning the last three decades of the artist’s career.
Unique to the exhibition at Dallas Contemporary, Davenport has created a number of new works as part of his Puddle Paintings series – these represent the artist’s most recent foray into the manipulation of and serendipitous acceptance of paint’s innate physical attributes to create large-scale pieces that occupy space with further physical dimensionality. Davenport applies paint to the surface from a height, so that a band of color runs vertically down the plane. Repeating this process with a thematic color scheme results in a multi-colored landscape composed of vertical stripes that subtly ebb and flow against the tenacity of gravity. The bands spill into an amorphous pool onto the floor – a physical extension of the vertical painting, which pushes the works into the sculptural realm.
Peter Doroshenko notes that “Davenport has been pushing the principles of color theory and optics for many years -- he is the spectrum conductor of our time.”
Above text courtesy of Dallas Contemporary.
Images courtesy of Ian Davenport Studio and Kevin Todora.
https://www.dallascontemporary.org/shop/p/horizons
