Ian Davenport Biography
IAN DAVENPORT
Born Sidcup 1966
British abstract painter and Turner Prize nominee, Ian Davenport is celebrated for his intricate colour compositions which explore the process of painting through a balance of control and chance. From the beginning of his career, Davenport has experimented with ordinary objects to apply and manipulate paint, including watering cans and electric fans, and is renowned for using hypodermic syringes to pour liquid household paint onto his surfaces.[1]
Davenport studied at Northwich College of Art and Design, Cheshire from 1984-85 and then at Goldsmiths College of Art, London from 1985-88, where he was taught by Michael Craig-Martin. On graduating, he participated in the Damien Hirst-curated exhibition Freeze at London Docklands in 1988, which started the careers of several Goldsmith students who would later become known as the YBAs (Young British Artists). He held his first one-man exhibition at the Waddington Galleries in 1990 and was included in The British Art Show, which toured to Leeds City Art Gallery and the Hayward Gallery, London in the same year. In 1991 the artist was nominated for the Turner Prize (alongside Anish Kapoor, Fiona Rae and Rachel Whiteread). He was a prize-winner at the John Moores Exhibition 21, Liverpool in 1999. Amongst other public commissions, Davenport produced Poured lines: Southwark Street in 2006, a 48-metre-long painting. In the spring of 2010, he was artist in residence at The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation in Bethany, Connecticut. Davenport was invited to design a pavilion for the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017, for which he painted Giardini Colourfall, a large-scale installation. A monograph on Davenport’s work was published by Thames & Hudson in 2014.
Ian Davenport’s work is represented in the following public collections: Arts Council Collection, Hayward Gallery, London; Birmingham City Art Gallery; British Council; British Museum, London; Contemporary Art Society; The Government Art Collection (Department for Culture Media and Sport); Grosvenor Museum, Cheshire; Jerwood Space, London; National Museum of Wales, Cardiff; Nuffield College, Oxford University; Paintings in Hospitals; Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery; Southampton City Art Gallery; Tate, London; Unilever, London; University of Kent, Canterbury; Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester; Centre Pompidou, Paris;
FNAC Fonds National d’art contemporain; Museum of Modern Art, La Spezia, Italy; Museum Voorlinden, Netherlands; Von der Heydt Museum, Wuppertal, Germany; Weltkunst Collection, Zurich; Borusan Art Gallery, Istanbul; Dallas Museum of Art, Texas; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, United States.
[1] ‘It is incredibly accurate at putting a specific amount of liquid where you want it to go.’ The artist cited in ibid., p.6.