Cy Gavin is an African-American figurative painter who lives and works in New York. He also makes sculpture, video, and performances, and in his painting is attracted to post-colonial themes, including contested histories, collective memory, land ownership issues, the African diaspora, and the trans-Atlantic slave trade. His work often employs unorthodox materials, such as denim, diamonds, Bermudian seeds and pink sand, human teeth, iron fillings, and paternal cremains.
Read MoreAlthough Gavin likes to underpin his art projects with research he constructs his stylised theatrical images intuitively, for they are the cumulative result of a long series of gradual adjustments. They take time to make.
Sometimes he paints very large unstretched 'canvases', including on denim, in twilight as night-time approaches. Resulting works, such as Untitled (Stars) and Untitled (Cavern) (both 2021), are intended to be viewed in low-light conditions, and have been exhibited on walls painted with light-absorbing paint. He is also an occasional curator and a gifted essayist.
Raised in Donora, Pennsylvania, where his parents worked in local glass factories, Gavin was always interested in drawing and visiting museums. Consequently he went to Pittsburgh where he acquired a BFA from Carnegie Mellon University in 2007. After spending a few years in San Francisco doing post-production film work, he went on to New York in 2011 to complete a MFA at Columbia University in 2016.
Gavin's enormous paintings are often characterised by a single African-American male, as seen in Portrait of My Father (2015), where his father's ashes are incorporated. In Reclining Nude (Nellie De Costa Smith) (2017), a figure hovers in space against a turbulent panorama in hot vibrant colour. Often unpeopled land as well as churning seascapes have also attracted his attention, as is evident in Underneath the George Washington Bridge (2016), Portrait of a Sunset (2018), and Untitled (Wave) (2021).
Gavin is master of subtle tonal control, particularly his manipulation of value. Examples include Black, Black, Black is the Color of My True Love's Hair (2015), Between Heaven and Earth (2015), and Rosewood Tucker's Point Golf Club and Cemetery (2016). Sometimes he uses a translucent black which he makes using tattoo ink, umber, and dark blue.
In an interview with W Magazine he stated, 'At some point, I made the decision to paint figures using a variety of materials and colours to approximate black,' he said. 'I was trying to visualise an idea of a conflated black identity, not just the experiences of African Americans.'
This artist is also very interested in symbolic animals and pieces of furniture for what they say metaphorically about the qualities of North America as a nation and key historic personages. See Untitled (Bald Eagle) (2020), Study of a Lion (2018), and Untitled (George Washington's Saxon Blue Sofa) (2020).
Gavin's first solo show, Fugue States, was in Revision Space, Pittsburgh in 2014. This was followed by a New York presentation of a dozen mixed-media works, Overture, at Sargent's Daughters in 2015. A year later at the same venue he presented At Heaven's Command, a reference to 'Rule, Britannia' and the forced settlement of Africans in Bermuda as slaves. From these, on his father's side, he is descended.
After being awarded a six-month residency at the Rubell Foundation in Miami, Gavin held Devils' Isle in Paris at VNH Gallery in 2018. The following year he had a show at Gavin Brown's enterprise in New York.
In 2021 Cy Gavin has a solo exhibition in London at David Zwirner Gallery. David Zwirner also presents At Sea, an online group exhibition with an essay from Gavin looking at J. M. W. Turner's experimental use of colour.
The artist has participated in Darkness Visible, Aspen Art Museum, Colorado (2021). The artist has also participated in the following group exhibitions: Ridiculous Sublime, SFA Advisory, New York (2021); The Lure of the Dark: Contemporary Painters Conjure the Night, Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA), North Adams (2018); Between the Waters, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2018); and High Anxiety, Rubell Family Collection, Miami (2016).
John Hurrell | Ocula | 2021
