Ian Davenport (born 8 July 1966) is an English abstract painter and former

Turner Prize The Turner Prize, named after the English painter J. M. W. Turner, is an annual prize presented to a British visual artist. Between 1991 and 2016, only artists under the age of 50 were eligible (this restriction was removed for the 2017 award) ...

nominee.

Life and work

Ian Davenport was born in

Sidcup Sidcup is an area of south-east London, England, primarily in the London Borough of Bexley. It is south-east of Charing Cross, bordering the London Boroughs of London Borough of Bromley, Bromley and Royal Borough of Greenwich, Greenwich. Before ...

. He studied art at Northwich College of Art and Design, in Cheshire, and then at

Goldsmiths College Goldsmiths, University of London, officially the Goldsmiths' College, is a constituent research university of the University of London in England. It was originally founded in 1891 as The Goldsmiths' Technical and Recreative Institute by the Wor ...

, from where he graduated in 1988. The same year he exhibited in the '' Freeze'' exhibition at Surrey Docks organised by Damien Hirst. In 1990 Davenport's first solo show was held at

Waddington Galleries Waddington Custot is a London-based art gallery specialising in modern and contemporary art. Formerly known as Waddington Galleries, it has been situated on Mayfair's Cork Street since 1958. History Waddington Galleries was founded on Cork ...

and he was included in the British Art Show. In 1991, he was nominated for the annual

.Serena Davies (19 August 2006)
Dance to the music of lines
''The Telegraph''. Accessed October 2013.Tom Teodorczuk (6 September 2006)

''London Evening Standard''. Accessed October 2013. In 1999, he had a solo exhibition at Dundee Contemporary Arts and was a prizewinner at the John Moores exhibition 21 in Liverpool. Many of his works are made by pouring paint onto a tilted surface and letting

gravity In physics, gravity () is a fundamental interaction which causes mutual attraction between all things with mass or energy. Gravity is, by far, the weakest of the four fundamental interactions, approximately 1038 times weaker than the stro ...

spread the paint over the surface. For the ''Days Like These'' exhibition at

Tate Britain Tate Britain, known from 1897 to 1932 as the National Gallery of British Art and from 1932 to 2000 as the Tate Gallery, is an art museum on Millbank in the City of Westminster in London, England. It is part of the Tate network of galleries in ...

in 2003, he made a thirteen-metre-high

mural A mural is any piece of graphic artwork that is painted or applied directly to a wall, ceiling or other permanent substrate. Mural techniques include fresco, mosaic, graffiti and marouflage. Word mural in art The word ''mural'' is a Spani ...

by dripping lines of differently-coloured paint down the wall from a

syringe A syringe is a simple reciprocating pump consisting of a plunger (though in modern syringes, it is actually a piston) that fits tightly within a cylindrical tube called a barrel. The plunger can be linearly pulled and pushed along the inside ...

. His most comprehensive exhibition to date was held at Ikon Gallery in Birmingham in 2004. The same year he was commissioned by the Contemporary Art Society to make a wall painting for the Institute of Mathematics and Statistics at Warwick University''.'' In September 2006, Davenport unveiled his largest public commission to date in the arches beneath Southwark Bridge, entitled '' Poured Lines: Southwark''. He painted the West End Wall of the University of Oxford Department of Biochemistry. In 2012, Davenport was commissioned to design an ‘Arty Wenlock’ for the London Olympics. It was installed on the Thames pathway between the Millennium Bridge and Tate Modern, for the duration of the games. A monograph on him was published in 2014. Davenport showed three decades of work in a solo survey exhibition at Dallas Contemporary, Texas, in 2018. He is a Patron of Paintings in Hospitals, a charity that provides art for health and social care in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.

References

External links

Ian Davenport Studio website

Artist's representative
{{DEFAULTSORT:Davenport, Ian 1966 births Living people 20th-century English painters English male painters 21st-century English painters Alumni of Goldsmiths, University of London People from Sidcup English contemporary artists Young British Artists British abstract artists 20th-century English male artists 21st-century English male artists