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Alan Davie (British, 1920-2014), "Scape Goat No. 1" and "Cliff Diver No. 1", 1981, two oils on board, former signed and dated upper left, titled lower left, latter signed, dated and titled lower left, verso with "Gimpel Fils Gallery, London, U.K." label, each 18-1/2" x 15". Both glazed and elaborately framed. Provenance: Estate of Lane Meltzer, New Orleans, Louisiana; Gimpel Fils Gallery, London, UK. Exhibited: Galerie d'Eendt, Amsterdam, May 83-February 1984. Alan Davie was one of the most acclaimed and accomplished British artists working in the abstract expressionist style. The son of a print-maker, the Scottish-born Davie was exposed to art at a young age and showed an eager appreciation of both art and music. Davie studied at Edinburgh College of Art before entering military service during WWII. In 1948, he traveled to Europe on a travel stipend, exhibiting in Florence and Venice where his work caught the attention of the art collector Peggy Guggenheim, who purchased several of his paintings. Influenced by post-war American artists such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning, all of whom he met on his first trip to New York in 1956, Davie had his own personal approach to abstract expressionism, layering the surfaces with mythical and mystical symbols, some of Celtic, Caribbean or African origin, others of his own invention. According to Tate Britain, Davie "was one of the first British artists after the war to develop an expressive form of abstraction. His kaleidoscopic canvases, the result of an improvisatory process that the artist relates to his love of jazz, form a complex web of imagery that evoke a magical world of imagination and personal mythology." His unusual technique had him placing the canvas or paper on the floor and painting from above, often incorporating a form of dynamic dance in the process. The spontaneous nature of his method owed much to his appreciation of Zen Buddhism, and he saw himself as a medium who conducted the images of the collective unconscious onto the canvas. As the artist himself once stated, "Although every work of mine must inevitably bear the stamp of my own personality, I feel that each one must, to be satisfactory, be a new revelation of something hitherto unknown to me, and I consider this evocation of the unknown to be the true function of any art". Although Davie faded into obscurity by the 1970's, there has been a renewed appreciation of his work in recent years. He was represented by the esteemed London Gallery of Gimpel Fils for over sixty years. References: Hudson, M. (2014, April 6), "The Artist that Time Forgot". The Telegraph.; "Davie, Alan" A Dictionary of Modern and Contemporary Art, by Ian Chilvers and John Glaves-Smith. Oxford University Press Inc.; Weber, B. (2014, April 16), "Alan Davie, Painter With a Global Bent , Dies at 93". New York Times; McNay, M. (2014, April 7), "Alan Davie - Obituary". The Guardian.; www. groveart.com.