Alan Davie
Grangemouth, Scozia, 1920 - 2014
In 1956-57 he won the Guggenheim Prize and from 1958 he began to participate in the Venice Biennale.
Among the galleries that deal with his work and that have organized several solo exhibitions are mentioned the Galerie Gimpel et Fils, the Galerie Louis Carré in Paris and numerous museums including the Carnegie Institut in Pittsburgh, the Stedekijk Museum in Amsterdam, The Kunsternes Hus of Oslo, the Kunsthalle of Bern etc.
The Cobra Museum in the Netherlands dedicated a prestigious retrospective to him in 1997 followed by that of the Scottish National Museum of Modern Art in 2000.
Among the galleries that deal with his work and that have organized several solo exhibitions are mentioned the Galerie Gimpel et Fils, the Galerie Louis Carré in Paris and numerous museums including the Carnegie Institut in Pittsburgh, the Stedekijk Museum in Amsterdam, The Kunsternes Hus of Oslo, the Kunsthalle of Bern etc.
The Cobra Museum in the Netherlands dedicated a prestigious retrospective to him in 1997 followed by that of the Scottish National Museum of Modern Art in 2000.
Alan Davie was a Scottish painter. Strongly inspired by Zen philosophies, his paintings consist of responsive and spontaneous primitive compositions painted with obsessive, conglomerate mark-making to form images that slip in between abstraction and representation. Davie was inspired by American Abstract Expressionism as well as Surrealism and the Cobra group. Davie’s roster of references and influences is extensive, and includes Jungian psychoanalysis, Pictish symbol stones, contemporary abstract painters, and his lifelong passion and aptitude for playing music. In 1956 Davie made his first trip to the United States where he was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Catherine Viviano Gallery and was introduced to Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Mark Rothko, and Willem de Kooning. His works are in museum collections worldwide: the Peggy Guggenheim Museum in Venice, Moma, New York, and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, The Tate Gallery and among others.
