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.

JO DAVENPORT MONOGRAPH
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Since graduating from her Masters Degree at the Victorian College of the Arts in 2011 Albury-based artist Jo Davenport has rapidly establishing herself as one of Australia's finest abstract painters. This 100pp full colour monograph spans the last 7 years of Davenport's practice and celebrates the evolution of her painterly engagement with the landscape of the Hume Region. Featuring a selection of glorious works from past exhibitions and accompanying catalogue essays, this monograph will be a collector's item for anyone who has found themselves entranced by this artist's evocative images. Limited edition of 100, full colour, printed on 300gsm satin art paper and PUR bound. Each book signed and editioned by the artist.

Each limited-edition book is signed and numbered by the artist.

“The landscape gives me so much pleasure, and I do feel a part of it.” This simple statement made by Jo Davenport goes to the heart of her artistic practice, and her way of viewing the natural world. Davenport is well known for her exuberantly coloured, gestural abstract paintings having exhibited regularly and with great success in Sydney and Melbourne since 2012. But to regard her work as pure abstraction along the lines of the mid-century Modernism is to disregard the driving force behind it. Namely, the artist’s deep connection to place, and her determination to translate what she refers to as the ‘felt experience’ into the tangible matter of oil on canvas.
Excerpt from 2018 monograph catalogue essay by Marguerite Brown

'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

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 a finalist in the King's School Art Prize (2019), Paddington Art Prize (2017), the Chippendale World Art Residency Landscape Prize, 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. She has staged major public solo exhibitions at MAMA (Murray Art Museum Albury,) Bathurst Regional Art Gallery and was curated into a group show at the Wangaratta Regional Gallery. Davenport's work is held in the collections of Bathurst Regional Art Gallery, 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.

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

Watch Jo Davenport's Artist Talk:

CATALOGUE ESSAYS
The Nature of Lanscape, by Marguerite Brown 2018
Surrounded by Sky, by Owen Craven 2016
A Natural Response, by Louise Martin-Chew 2015
Time Recalled, by Phe Luxford 2014
Remembered Landscape, by Laura Skerlj 2012

DOWNLOAD BIO / CV (PDF)

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Media Highlights

Autumn Morning Splitters Creek I 2016
mixed media on rag paper
136cm x 81cm framed
Sold
Sold

End of Day 2018
oil, encaustic and graphite on board, framed
60cm x 60cm (80 x 80cm framed)
$4,000 AUD

After Winter, Spring 2018
oil on Belgian linen
92cm x 92cm
Sold
Sold

From the Back Hill III 2018
oil on Belgian linen
45cm x 45cm (60 x 58 cm framed)
Sold
Sold

St Pauls parish of Tambaroona 2016
mixed media on rag paper
49cm x 62cm framed
$1,200 AUD

Tambaroona I 2016
mixed media on rag paper
87cm x 68cm framed
$4,000 AUD

Hargraves Took the Glory I 2016
mixed media on rag paper
87cm x 68cm framed
$4,000 AUD

Hargraves Took the Glory II 2016
mixed media on rag paper
49cm x 62cm framed
$1,200 AUD