Artists & Works

STYLE: HOMAGE TO PICASSO,
POP

Alan Davie studied at the Edinburgh College of Art and had his first one-person show at Gimpel Fils in London in 1950. He is considered one of the pioneers of Abstract-expressionism and has had over 100 one-person shows at leading galleries throughout Europe and North America. Davie's work is in the collection of most major institutions of modern and contemporary art, including The Museum of Modern Art, the Tate Gallery, the Carnegie Institute, and many others.

Davie's paintings reference his interests in primitive and ancient art, Zen Buddhism, music, and gliding. The artist has created a symbolic pictorial language that he employs in his work, which includes wheels, stars, snakes and crosses. The use of these symbols reflects Davie's belief that "Images are not made as art objects but as channels of communion with the divine." From his earliest works in the fifties, which were gestural, abstract, and loosely painted, Davie's paintings evolved to include recognizable icons, deliberately arranged in patterns. His untitled work for Homage to Picasso includes symbolic imagery (including two figures) meant to suggest the artist's relationship with Picasso: the text in the print reads "for my dearly loved master, Pablo Picasso."

CRITICAL EXCERPTS

David Ebony, Art in America, 2/94
Fanciful ideograms culled from a wide variety of world cultures were developed by Davie over the years into a highly refined visual code. Since the early seventies, the artist has lived for part of each year on the Caribbean island of St. Lucia, where he has cultivated his love of Caribe petroglyphs as well as other non-Western symbols. Eventually his use of these signs took precedence over his more abstract, painterly gestures. In this exhibition, the evolution of his iconography was played out in the many stunning gouaches that made up the core of the show. Symbols derived from Egyptian, Celtic, Hindu, Hopi, Caribe, African and Oceanic art are often inter-mixed. Although Davie's sign systems seem to refer to religion, magic ritual or shamanism, they are never didactic, much less dogmatic. Though they may appear to tell stories, there is no explicit narrative. He aims toward a personal visual poetry.