The Cat Street Gallery is thrilled to exhibit Australian artist Paul Davies for his first solo show in London’s global art fair. Davies is one of Australia’s most sought after contemporary artists and has recently been featured on the front cover of Vogue Australia as their ‘Art Throb’.
Born in Australia and living in Los Angeles, this show will introduce Davies to an European audience where his work is driven by friction between opposing forces of built and natural environments, design and art, abstraction and figuration. These boundaries and relationships are illustrated through Davies process, which combines painting, stenciling, photography and sculpture.
In this era of surveillance Davies repeats and collages facades of modern architecture, the neutrality of which blurs what is revealed and concealed. Observing the manner in which information is often reiterated Davies employs stencils, hand cut from the artists’ own digital photographs. These are employed in various mediums to render uncertain what is original and what is reproduction.
‘Hollywood Stills’ content derives from Davies archive of photographs that document quintessentially Southern Californian built and natural environments portrayed in popular culture. Akin to the way a vase, chair or flowers might be arranged to compose a still life painting the artist cut these photos into stencils to collage and repeat in various combinations using paint onto the canvas. This method on one hand looks at formal aspects of painting, while on the other observes the various potential readings of a seemingly single perspective.
ART16 is the fourth edition of London’s global art fair. The fair returns to Olympia in Kensington for new summer dates from Friday 20th-Sunday 22nd May 2016. Art16 will showcase the next generation of talent alongside some of the most established contemporary galleries and art spaces from across the globe.
Davies graduated from the College of Fine Arts UNSW, with a Major in Sculpture. Shortly after graduating from COFA in 2000 he discovered the graffiti and street art practices of Sydney based artists and began employing these techniques to the sculpture he had studied. Davies is currently studying a Masters by research at the College of Fine Arts, which investigates the relationship between the built and natural environment in his work.
