calendario eventi  :: 

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29/11/2005

Double show

Gimpel Fils, London

Alan Davie
Early Works

"...an artist who bids to be recognized as the most remarkable British painter to have emerged in recent years." The Times, 6 March 1958

Described as Scotland's greatest living painter, Alan Davie has had a prolific career, spanning six decades and his reputation as an artistic visionary producing innovative and intuitive paintings continues to grow. Following his successful retrospective at Tate St. Ives in 2003-4, Gimpel Fils is pleased to present an exhibition of works from the 1950s and early 1960s, which chart Davie's development as a leading exponent of abstraction.

Having met Peggy Guggenheim in Venice 1948, Alan Davie was one of the first British painters to be exposed to early examples of American Abstract expressionism. Paralleling developments made by Pollock, Rothko and De Kooning, Davie experimented with abstraction throughout the 1950s, producing canvasses such as Domain of the Serpent, 1951, which juxtaposes geometric shapes with the beginnings of his fluid gestural brushwork. Executed in rich impasto black and red oils this painting hints at how Davie's work was to develop over the next decade. Throughout this period, Alan Davie produced works that indicate an interest in the relationship between the vitality of life, painting and spirituality.

Heavily influenced by his love of jazz (Davie is an accomplished musician as well as painter), the works in this exhibition illustrate how Davie came to marry a sense of improvisation and spontaneity within a bounded structure. Having also viewed Peggy Guggenheim's collection of Surrealist works, Davie's interest in the freeing potential of music, seems wholly in synch with Breton's notions of automatism and the release from self-consciousness. Goddess of the Wheel, from January 1960, demonstrates the agility of Davie's approach to painting, with its fusion of colour and movement. In this work, an underlying structure is present, across which dynamic, free flowing forms give expression to the creative subconscious.

Other recent exhibitions of Alan Davie's artwork include 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, Sao Paulo.

Lower Gallery
Andrew Lewis: Crown Imperial

Monarchy is the immediate feature of Crown Imperial, an exhibition of digital prints and new sculptures by Andrew Lewis. In this exhibition, Lewis presents a series of images proposing the crown of the British Monarch as an imaginary and allegorical architectural structure. Three hybrid sculptures composed of architectural styles and motifs from different time periods and places stand alongside the prints. All the works in this exhibition are at once familiar and strange, and it is with this paradox that Lewis is concerned.

The crown and orb in this exhibition were initially thought of as objects in a still life. Placing them within an urban context changed their scale and, altering perspective, Lewis challenges his audience to see familiar things in a new light. The relationship between the crown and country sites these digital prints within a nation and a national history. However, their presentation here upsets preconceived ideas about social hierarchies and the exclusivity of royal spaces. On closer inspection this crown is not an exclusive royal palace, but is a care centre, rehabilitating the drug addicts of society; Princes Charles and William make a royal visit to a sanatorium, forced to mingle with anonymous unwell or depressed people. Questioning who or what Monarchy is for, Lewis is interested in how the spectacle of jewelled structures can coexist, or not, with troubled contemporary urban living. Faced with layers of meaning and association, viewers are forced to consider the relationship between the traditions and reality of where we live. The interaction between his people and the world they inhabit is complex and at times uncertain.

The sculpture Misfits is indicative of this uncertainty of belonging to, but not fitting in, a particular society. A strange vehicle, a hovercraft mounted with a rocket, related in shape to Russian architectural onion-domes, doesn't seem to make visual sense. Containing photographs of Elgar, Coleridge-Taylor and Lewis himself, the work ponders how artists can come to stand for a national culture, when they themselves feel outside of it. Lewis' work is often melancholic; the problematic duality of belonging and not belonging, of being sick in a beautiful environment is meditated upon. He is interested in how utopian spaces are often not all they seem. Dismantling social hierarchies and boundaries, Andrew Lewis poses questions about where we all belong.

Andrew Lewis was born in London in 1968 and studied at the Mackintosh School of Architecture, Glasgow. He has exhibited widely, including, Systems, at InIVA, London, in 2002, White Van Men GB, Galerie Serieuze Zaken, Amsterdam, in 2002, Photo Opportunities, New Art Gallery, Walsall, 2004, and The Misfits, Attitudes, espace d'arts contemporains, Geneva, 2005. Crown Imperial is the seventh exhibition in the Gimpel Fils Lower Gallery. Past exhibitors include Gedi Sibony, Hazel McLeod, Lucy Stein, and Harold Offeh. The Lower Gallery opened in November 2004 as a dedicated contemporary art space devoted to showcasing work by emerging and established artists who have not previously exhibited at Gimpel Fils.

Image: Alan Davie, Cure for the Blues, Sept.1964. Oil on canvas 60 x 48 in / 152 x 122 cm

Gimpel Fils
30 Davies Street London W1K 4NB UK
Hours:
Monday - Friday 10.00 am - 5.30 pm
Saturday 11.00 am - 4.00 pm

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