Ian Davis

Ian Davis creates large scale paintings reminiscent of New Yorker magazine covers. His subject is maleness, whose omnipresence, ineffectiveness and herd instinct he conjures up in small identical figures that he deploys with the marshaled repetitions of a Minimalist. The figures can be businessmen, hundreds of whom sit passively in convention halls or stand on banquet tables with their hands raised, as if enacting some inane ritual. Or they can be British redcoats who march across fields of graduated grays, or strip trees of their branches for no apparent reason. Somewhere in the twentieth century men are gathering . . . waiting and watching.