Ian Davenport Pathway (Yellow) For Sale

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.