Alan Davie Recent Paintings and Gouaches - 2003

PRESS RELEASE

Alan Davie stands as one of Britain’s most internationally acclaimed artists and as Scotland’s most important artist of the twentieth century.

Now in his eighty-forth year, Davie continues to produce paintings of startling originality, vitality and daring. Combining imagery derived from different world cultures with a love of music and language, Davie’s paintings are a complex yet joyous celebration of creativity that combine the expressive freedom of abstraction with a wealth of signs, symbols and words.

This exhibition, coinciding with a major retrospective at Tate St Ives (October 2003 - January 2004), provides a first opportunity to see the artist’s exhilarating recent paintings as well as presenting a significant new group of gouaches on paper.

In celebration of this exhibition by this important modern British artist, James Hyman Gallery has specially commissioned and published a boxed set of limited edition screenprints by Alan Davie. Each deluxe box contains 34 new screenprints and each individual print is signed and numbered by the artist. There are just 34 sets of these prints and for a limited period a small number of these portfolios will be available at a special pre-publication price.

The exhibition is accompanied by a major new publication with over 40 colour illustrations, that reproduce the recent works as well as showing the artist’s studio and home. It also publishes for the first time a lengthy exchange of letters between the artist and James Hyman, which provide new insights into Davie’s intentions and motivation.

For further information please contact Christabel Armsden at the gallery.


SELECTED REVIEWS

Where to buy... The Week reviews an exhibition in a private gallery

Alan Davie
At James Hyman Gallery

The distinguished Scottish painter and jazz musician Alan Davie held his first solo exhibition in 1950, and by the end of the decade had achieved an international reputation. He is now 83, but his paintings are still vibrant with life and quirky originality. Davie believes in an international pictorial language springing from the collective unconscious, and his works are an exotic mixture of signs and symbols drawn from his own imagination and folk or tribal art worldwide. There are echoes from Caribbean, African, Oceanic and ancient Celtic art, with Surrealist elements stirred into the mix. The result is as complex as an oriental carpet or jewel-encrusted embroidery. Prices range from £2000 for small oils to £22,000 for large oils.