Alan Wheatley Art

Following critically acclaimed exhibition entitled ‘To Uncover the Hidden Unknown’, Alan Wheatley Art is delighted to announce a new exhibition of early oil paintings by one of the most influential Modern British living artists, Alan Davie.

Alan Davie (born in 1920, Grangemouth, Scotland) is one of Britain's most internationally acclaimed living artists of the post-war era. Distinguished by spontaneity, exuberant colour and improvisation, Davie's work has been shown frequently and with great success for 70 years!

This new exciting exhibition at Alan Wheatley Art will feature 25 early oil paintings dated 1945–1970 and it will provide the opportunity to view previously unseen significant early works by the artist.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with essays by Dr Michael Tucker and Douglas Hall (both collaborated on the Alan Davie monograph published by Lund Humphries in 1992.)

‘Painting is a much more mysterious Art than is generally believed […] a picture is no longer of necessity a beautiful thing to live with or to look at (beautiful in the generally acknowledged sense) … it must be a thing of more fundamental value, a thing of character and imbued with a power of its own, sometimes even a brutal or destructive power, but a life that is strong and growing and creative itself … a thing which should be looked at with a different mentality … a thing exciting and often even disturbing or frightening, yet having a beauty which is beyond beautiful.’
Alan Davie (extract from his travel journal, Florence, August 1948)

Like his heroes, Paul Klee, Jackson Pollock and Joan Miró, Alan Davie has drawn inspiration for his paintings from music, jazz in particular, and is himself an accomplished player of several instruments. A multi-faceted creative spirit, Davie has been also absorbed by a wide range of interest, which includes the teachings of Zen philosophy and oriental mysticism, primitive art, modern music, underwater swimming and gliding.

Although Davie’s roots are in Scottish painting, and close to the warmth and vivacity of modern French art, Davie has created his own unique artistic language, related to the diversity of his interests. His work contains strong symbolic elements associated with the very beginnings of art where shapes and signs carried great significance.

Davis’ first one-man show was held in 1946 at Grant's Bookshop in Edinburgh. In 1950 Davie held his first one-man London exhibition at Gimpel Fils.