Peter Davies
Peter davies born in Scotland and is currently living and working in London.
Peter Davies is a Scottish artist currently living and working in London. His work has been exhibited at the Royal Academy of Art in London, Centro Brasileiro Britanico in Sao Paulo, the Saatchi Gallery in London, Kunsthallen Brandts Klaedefabrik in Denmark and the ICA in London.
In 2002 he won the John Moores Painting Prize. Hibrow’s team talked to Peter at Tate St Ives on the opening night of their Indiscipline of Painting retrospective of abstraction within painting.
Davies also sources his works from direct observations and drawings when at location in daily life. When printing his work, he uses the reduction process which he says is a limitation but also a great discipline. His process involves printing in greys which show the reduction process. Any white paper in the prints are areas he cuts away at the start of the process, revealing the plain white paper. Print making also has its difficulties when working wet on wet.
Davies’s paintings combine ‘the tough, dry humour of conceptualism and the elegance and beauty of formalism’. As Davies explains: ‘It allows conceptualism to be a “look” and formalism to be an “idea”.’ Peter Davies paints transient pop-cultural information systems – lists, charts, bylines – in the slick, clean, high-art tradition of minimalist painting. As in Peter Davies’s abstract works – which are often mega-sized canvases filled with imperfect patterns of bright colours – his aim is to bring the sterile stereotypes of modernism down to a user-friendly level. In his text paintings, Davies uses paint, language and structure to talk about art as if it were just another commodity in the entertainment business; by doing so he places himself at the forefront.
In a giant incomprehensible flow chart (a form borrowed from Beuys’s blackboard works), he maps out the ‘six degrees of separation’ of his art heroes, linking them impossibly to each other, and inevitably back to Beuys. It requires the complicated linear thinking of a late-night drinking game, but Davies proves it’s only twelve easy jumps from Picasso to Sarah Lucas (if Peter Doig and Matthew Barney’s love of sport can be counted as an actual link). Peter Davies presents an art history on a functional level: it’s about as close to science as it gets.
