Ian Davenport - Poured Lines

29 Jan — 23 Feb 2008

I am a sculptor who makes paintings

Waddington Galleries are pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings by Ian Davenport. These eleven paintings, all completed in 2007 and all of water-based paint on aluminum, continue Davenport’s exploration with the essence of paint – its fluidity and colour.

In 1988, whilst still at Goldsmiths College, Davenport made a painting depicting a paint pot with drips running down its side. The drips were portrayed by physically dripping paint down the surface, which he found the most engaging component of the work and suggestive for further ways of working. He has since revealed the liquidity of paint through many household instruments - watering cans, electric fans, dripped from masonry nails and in the present paintings through a syringe.

Although the process of application appears tightly structured, paintings such as Poured Lines: Green avoid being clinical as the channelled paint is allowed to run downwards on its own course, to occasionally bleed into the neighbouring colour. In two works such as Poured lines: Puddle and Poured Lines: Prime the paint is allowed to ebb, expand and pool as it reaches the bottom of the aluminum panel and tries to find its own natural level - the aqueous nature of acrylic exposed through gravity and its trace solidified in colour.

Working through initial colour combinations drawn on a computer and citing such catholic stimulus as car bonnets, The Simpsons cartoon and Piero Della Francesca, the paintings demonstrate Davenport’s confident use of effervesant multiple colours. Our urban spaces are constructed on plumblines and works such as Poured Lines: Ultramarine Light use the vivid manufactured pigments of city life compressed together on a vertical axis, each colour seemingly receding or advancing across the vibrant blue ground.

Davenport has stated that “there is a lot of rhythm in the work” and in the same studio space he keeps a drum kit. Drumming, through measured repetition creates momentum and tempo shares equivalence to his painting. Whether it is the sharp staccato of a top cymbal that echoes the tight bright lines of Poured Lines: Permanent Red, or the soft deep bass drum that is allowed to resonate and blur like the broader monotone lines of the smallest work in the exhibition Poured Lines: White & Black.
In 2006 Davenport completed the vast Poured lines: Southwark Street commissioned by Southwark Council and Land Securities. At fifty metres wide this recital of released colour showed an unnerving ambition to work on a large-scale whilst maintaining a fragility of line. It is a dualism that can be seen in the monumental Poured lines: Dark Red (Echo), the exhibition’s largest painting at 2.5 metres high by 4 metres wide. Here the tension is felt between the inflexible sequence of static-like columns and the malleable nature of water-based paint; between the accuracy of control against the probability of accident; the effortlessness of gravity against the almost analytical choice of colour.

Born in 1966, Ian Davenport held his first ever solo exhibition at Waddington Galleries in 1990 (this will be his sixth) and has also shown at Galerie Xippas, Paris, Galerie Slewe, Amsterdam and the Ikon Gallery 2004 in Birmingham. Group exhibitions have included the seminal Freeze, London 1988, Turner Prize (nominee) Tate Gallery 1991, Jerwood painting prize (nominee) 2001 and Days Like These, Tate Britain, London 2003.

A fully illustrated colour catalogue, with an introduction by Sarah Whitfield, accompanies the exhibition.