Broad Line Etchings
5 works
Ian Davenport Pathway (Yellow) For Sale
Ian Davenport
Pathway (Yellow), 2024
Gloss enamel screenprint on Somerset Tub Sized Satin 600gsm paper
Paper: 164.0 x 134.2 cm - Image: 147.3 x 119.1 cm Paper: 64 5/8 x 52 7/8 in - Image: 58 x 46 7/8 in
About this work
Ian Davenport has established himself as one of Britain's most significant abstract painters, his work held in the permanent collections of the Tate, the Dallas Museum of Art, and the Arts Council Collection. A Turner Prize nominee in 1991, Davenport emerged from Goldsmiths alongside the Young British Artists but pursued a distinctly rigorous investigation into the physics and aesthetics of poured paint. His practice transforms the simple act of gravity into a precise visual language, creating works that exist at the intersection of control and chance. Pathway (Yellow) from 2024 continues Davenport's celebrated exploration of vertical colour fields, rendered here as a gloss enamel screenprint on heavyweight Somerset paper. The work belongs to his ongoing examination of chromatic interaction, where parallel streams of pigment create optical vibrations and spatial depth. Yellow, a colour Davenport has described as particularly challenging for its intensity and psychological weight, dominates the composition while adjacent hues establish rhythmic tension across the picture plane. The gloss enamel medium, transferred through screenprinting, preserves the lustrous surface quality central to Davenport's painted works, capturing light in ways that shift with the viewer's position. Issued in an edition of twenty-five, this print offers access to Davenport's visual vocabulary at a scale that commands presence while remaining true to his methodological concerns. The substantial dimensions—over 160 centimetres in height—allow the characteristic drip formations to unfold with the deliberation his practice demands. Guy Hepner welcomes inquiries regarding the acquisition of this work.
Price on Application
Edition & Provenance
- Year
- 2024
- Medium
- Gloss enamel screenprint on Somerset Tub Sized Satin 600gsm paper
- Edition
- Edition of 25
Related Reading
More series by Ian Davenport
About the Pathway Series
“The juxtaposition between organisation and disarray within Davenport’s work is powerful and striking […] Regularity is opposed with rapture. Reason is set against ecstasy.” –Alastair Sooke
Cristea Roberts Gallery is delighted to present Pathway, a solo exhibition of prints and works on paper by Ian Davenport. The prints are in a variety of scales, some made using a combination of up to forty colours. They are exhibited alongside Davenport’s largest ever work on paper, measuring almost three metres in length and made using his technique of applying jets of colour to form densely layered compositions.
The works in Pathway exemplify a further and more daring exploration into the nature of materials and colour, that underpins the artist’s evolving practice. Davenport’s sixth exhibition at Cristea Roberts Gallery is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue featuring a text by art critic, writer and broadcaster Alastair Sooke.
About Ian Davenport
Ian Davenport (b. 1965, Sidcup, Kent) is one of the most immediately recognisable and formally inventive painters to emerge from the YBA generation, an artist who in the early 1990s committed himself to a systematic investigation of paint, gravity, and the painted surface that has deepened and diversified over three decades without losing its initial radicalism. Davenport studied at Goldsmiths College, graduating in 1988 into the same extraordinary cohort that included Damien Hirst, Michael Landy, Sarah Lucas, and Gary Hume. He was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1991, one of the earliest nominations in the prize's history to go to a painter working in this rigorously non-representational mode.
Davenport's signature technique involves pouring liquid paint from the top of a canvas or support, allowing gravity to dictate the resulting vertical lines, or controlling poured arcs and horizontal stripes that pool and blend at the base. The process is simultaneously systematic and contingent: Davenport plans his colour sequences and dilutions with great care, but the exact behaviour of the paint as it flows and interacts remains partly outside his control. The results are works of extraordinary chromatic vibrancy and optical complexity — neighbouring colours bleed into one another at the edges, creating secondary hues and atmospheric effects that shift with viewing distance and light conditions. His series include Poured Lines, Colourfall, Puddle Paintings, Circular, and Arc works, each exploring a different configuration of his central method.
Working in industrial household paints — Davenport has long used the durability, pigment density, and workable viscosity of commercial paints rather than artist-grade materials — he produces surfaces that are both physically robust and visually luminous. The work carries its technical intelligence lightly: standing in front of a Colourfall or a major Poured Lines canvas, the formal decisions dissolve into pure perceptual pleasure. At auction, his paintings have achieved significant results: Poured Painting: Green, Magenta, Orange, Yellow, Blue, Red (1999) achieved £100,000 at Phillips London in July 2020, and Poured Lines: Cerise (2007) reached £126,000 at Christie's London in October 2021. His print editions — produced in accessible formats with strong chromatic fidelity to the painted originals — range from thousands to tens of thousands of pounds and represent excellent entry points for collectors new to his work.
Davenport's work is held in permanent collections at Tate, the Museum of Modern Art, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Sprengel Museum Hanover, Borusan Contemporary Istanbul, the Arts Council Collection, and the National Museum Cardiff, among other institutions.
Guy Hepner brings deep expertise to Ian Davenport's editions and original paintings. Our gallery at 177 Tenth Avenue, New York is well placed to assist collectors in acquiring his work or in selling and valuing existing holdings. We offer free, confidential valuations and access to a global network of collectors engaged with contemporary British painting.