Cristea Roberts Gallery
Ian Davenport
13.September.24 - 19.October.24

Cristea Roberts Gallery is delighted to present Pathway, a solo exhibition of prints and works on paper by Ian Davenport. The prints are in a variety of scales, some made using a combination of up to forty colours. They are exhibited alongside Davenport’s largest ever work on paper, measuring almost three metres in length and made using his technique of applying jets of colour to form densely layered compositions.

The works in Pathway, made using a wide range of complex techniques and processes, exemplify a further and more daring exploration into the nature of materials and colour, that underpins the artist’s evolving practice. For the past decade Davenport’s works have been characterised by sequences of vibrant vertical bands that cascade into pools of colour. The surface tension created by breaking the conformity of the lines to create pooled colours dominates Davenport’s compositions. However, in his new prints the viewers eye is no longer immediately drawn to this downward motion.

Ian Davenport: Pathway Davenport’s new works are dominated by the structures of light and shadow that play across the entire surface of the image. In Mirrored Red and Black Etching, 2021, a bright cluster of burning red and orange stripes in the middle of the composition fade to darkness at the edge, creating a tension and drama not previously seen in the artist’s work. In a further group of five screenprints, entitled Mirrored Enamel, 2022, Davenport continues to arrange colours symmetrically, so they are moving outwards from the middle. In these prints and a new group of three monumental works, Pathway, 2024, Davenport abandons a white background.

He creates a sense of compression by printing the cascading colours over a range of hues, including blue, black, yellow, turquoise and red. Colour relationships are crucial to these works, as their arrangements oscillate between vibrating and vanishing boundaries and illusions of transparency. Making these colour investigations in editioned form affords Davenport the possibility of creating multiple compositions to fully explore colour and tonal variations in a way that is not possible in another medium.

The exhibition is completed with a new body of work made by Davenport shooting jets of paint with a syringe at paper pinned to his studio wall. He uses gravity to explore the complex arrangement of marks and patterns made when colour is splattered. Davenport has used this technique to create his largest ever unique work on paper, Set Piece, 2024, which measures 154 × 280 cm.

Further new related paintings, Red Fizzle and Blue Fizzle, 2024 are heavily layered paintings, made by the ricochets and splinters of colour that disperse when Davenport dispels paint from a syringe. The crowded specks and marks concentrated at the bottom of the paper, are almost entirely random, freeing from them any kind of restraint.

Davenport’s methods of execution to achieve these compositions, in both print and paint, are driven by a desire to investigate the paradox between control and chance. Alastair Sooke, art critic and writer explains, “The juxtaposition between organisation and disarray within Davenport’s work is powerful and striking […] Regularity is opposed with rapture. Reason is set against ecstasy.”

Pathway, Davenport’s sixth exhibition at Cristea Roberts Gallery, is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue featuring a text by art critic, writer and broadcaster Alastair Sooke. Davenport is also the subject of a new episode of the Cristea Roberts Gallery podcast series, Making a Mark, which delves into the lives of contemporary artists and their approach to drawing and printmaking.