CONTEMPORARY ART STOCKROOM Jo Davenport

Jo Davenport’s beautifully gestural paintings speak of an intense relationship with nature and an intimate experience of the artists’ local environment. Her rich, painterly depictions represent the passing of time, the transience of the landscape and the ephemeral nature of memory itself.

Whilst painting has always been a central part of Jo Davenport’s life, her career accelerated in 2011 with the completion of her Masters degree from the Victorian College of the Arts. In the following years her practice quickly gained the attention of both curators and collectors alike and in 2013 was included in Wangaratta Art Gallery’s major painting survey Action/Abstraction, showing alongside artists such as Sally Gabori, Todd Hunter, Ildiko Kovacs, and Aida Tomescu. Davenport undertook a residency at the Bathurst Regional Art Gallery in Hill End in October 2015 and held a major solo exhibition at MAMA Regional Gallery in Albury in 2016. In the same year her work Sunshine and Rain was acquired by Artbank.

Davenport has been successfully exhibiting with Flinders Lane Gallery since 2012.

'In approaching landscape as a subject...my paintings hope to capture landscape in the spontaneous instance when the past is almost gone, and the future is just starting to appear. The result is an impulsive act of colour and mark-making that brings the transient experience into view.'
Jo Davenport 2012

Davenport has previously been a finalist in the Tattersall's Club Prize for Landscape, the R M McGivern Prize, and the recipient of The Langridge Painting Award, the Shelmedine Acquisitive Art Award, the Alliance Francaise Award and the Pigment Gallery Award. Davenport's work is held in the collections of Leeuwin Estate Art Collection, Artbank, Hong Kong's Norman Foster Club House Tai Po, Wangaratta Regional Art Gallery, The University of Melbourne, Mercy Hospital Albury and ArtStream Investment Group, as well as in private collections in Australia, UK, USA, Hong Kong, France, Canada and Japan. A constant traveller, Davenport has undertaken residencies and research trips globally, drawing on the landscapes of Europe, Asia and Australia to inform her practice.