NOW REPRESENTING KARIN DAVIE

NEW YORK, NEW YORK – MILES McENERY GALLERY is pleased to announce representation of Karin Davie.

Canadian-born artist Karin Davie’s abstract paintings are not static or non-referential; they are loaded with references and charged with a somatic record of the artist’s movement.Overlapping accumulations of lush brush strokes dominate in Davie’s work, creating an optical illusion of space, tricking the eye into perceiving a three-dimensional image that appears to pulsate or undulate on a flat surface—but Davie goes further, introducing a temporal dimension. In using the iconic Op art  “wave” motif  and gesture on shaped or divided formats, Davie explores the phenomenological and temporal aspects of color and form, allowing the viewer to mimetically trace the action of her body as it makes its way across the canvas. Her paintings are optical, physical, and immersive—like a photon leaving phosphorescent remnants as it pulses through a confined space.

Davie paints with choreographed abandon. Her characteristic wavy lines of strokes are highly obsessive and repetitive, generated by spontaneous arm and body movements, but also restrained. Together these sensate fields with luminous gradations of color and vibrating with energy draw the viewer into a buzzy vertiginous space, or one with hypnotic effect. Although her rhythmic paintings are abstract and do not depict recognizable objects, they are imbued through an intuitive process with a paradoxical representational quality—one that’s visceral and evokes the human body and cells, or a cosmic landscape, the micro or macro. A surprising literal correlation coexists between Davie’s allusive imagery, and the humorously shaped canvases in which they are grounded, often with an intrusive division, or cutout, derived from body part tracings (thumb, elbows, knees, hips). Ever-present in Davie’s works are themes of absence & presence, revealing & concealing, physical & metaphysical—culminating in an artistic expression uniquely her own.

KARIN DAVIE (b. in Toronto, Canada) received her Master of Fine Arts from the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI and her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada. In 2006, the Buffalo AKG Art Museum (Buffalo, NY) exhibited a major solo retrospective of Davie’s early to mid-career work. Davie has received numerous distinguished awards over the course of her career, including the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship Award in 2015.

Davie’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT; The Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Buffalo, NY; CHART, New York, NY; Diaz Contemporary, Toronto, Ontario, Canada; Inman Gallery, Houston, TX; Mary Boone Gallery, New York, NY; SITE, Santa Fe, NM; Wetterling Gallery, Stockholm, Sweden; White Cube, London, United Kingdom; and Van Doren Waxter, New York, NY, among others.

The artist has been included in group exhibitions at numerous international institutions including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.; Rubell Museum, Miami, FL; The Art Gallery of Ontario, Ontario, Canada; Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, PA; Kunsthaus Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland; The Maramotti Museum, Reggio Emilia, Italy; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, NY; The Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, WA; Tate St. Ives International and Contemporary Art, Cornwall, United Kingdom; Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC; and The American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, NY.

Her work may be found in the collections of the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Ontario, Canada; The Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Buffalo, NY; The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum & Art Gallery, Saratoga Springs, NY; Kunstverein in Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany; Maramotti Collection, Reggio Emilia, Italy; Nerman Museum Of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, KS;  The Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, FL; Orlando Museum of Art, Orlando, FL; Palm Springs Art Museum, Palm Springs, CA; Rubell Museum, Miami, FL; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, WA; and elsewhere.