‘I’m not interested in the narration of a picture, but rather in the colours.’

Born in Kent in 1966, Ian Davenport studied at Goldsmith College of Art in London and was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1991.

The trademarks of Ian Davenport are his Poured Lines and Puddle Paintings, with which he became internationally successful and developed his artistic independence. Poured Lines, a fifty-metre-long wall of colour under a railway bridge in the south of London, attracted international attention.

One day, in search of a new artistic direction, Davenport observed the flow of a drop of paint. The gravity that let it flow downwards and the randomness of the path it took inspired Davenport to experiment with this.

Davenport applies the paints with a syringe along the upper edge of the picture and lets them flow downwards on thin sheets of steel. Initially, he let the drops find their own way. The result was irregular lines; the drop of paint moved downwards in a slight curve, and chance determined the pictorial composition. Davenport then began to steer the paths of the drops of paint. They became straighter, linear. The early randomness increasingly disappeared. For the Puddle Paintings, he interrupts the flow of paint by bending the lower part of the metal sheet to a horizontal plane, on which the lines of colour flow into ‘puddles’.