Ian Davenport — Pathway For Sale

"The juxtaposition between organisation and disarray within Davenport's work is powerful and striking [...] Regularity is opposed with rapture." – Alastair Sooke

Cristea Roberts Gallery presented Pathway, a solo exhibition of prints and works on paper by Ian Davenport, during Frieze Week 2024 — the artist's sixth exhibition at the gallery. The series takes its name almost by accident: while a member of Davenport's studio team was helping him test colour combinations on a computer, one of the resulting images was described as looking like "a pathway," and the name stuck.

The Pathway prints are screenprints built from a single source painting image, reworked across a wide range of colourways using Davenport's gloss enamel ink — the same glossy, paint-like surface he developed for his enamel screenprints, formulated to echo the sheen of the household gloss paint he pours in his paintings. The largest works in the series, including Pathway (Turquoise), use up to forty individual colours printed on Somerset Tub Sized Satin 600gsm paper, each in an edition of 25, making them among the largest and most technically demanding screenprints Davenport has produced.

Alongside the prints, the exhibition featured Davenport's largest-ever unique work on paper, measuring almost three metres in length, built using his technique of applying jets of colour to form dense, layered compositions. The show was accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with a text by art critic, writer and broadcaster Alastair Sooke, situating Pathway within Davenport's ongoing investigation of colour, process, and the tension between control and chance that has defined his work since he began pouring paint from syringes in the late 1980s.