Tim Davis: Illilluminations

Solo exhibition

Greenberg Van Doren Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new photographs by Tim Davis, from February 9 – March16, 2006. Illilluminations is the artist’s first one-person exhibition at the gallery and his fourth in New York. Recent museum exhibitions featuring his work include The New City: Suburbia at The Whitney Museum of Art, Second Sight at Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College, and This Must Be the Place at Bard College, among others. Tim Davis is the subject two new monographs Permanent Collection (Nazraeli Press) and My Life in Politics (Aperture). A full-color catalogue accompanies the exhibition with a poem by Robert Fitterman.

Illilluminations will feature approximately twenty color photographs in varying sizes, ranging from the intimate (11 x 14) to the large scale (48x 60). Though the subject matter ranges from still life and interiors to ‘figures’ and landscapes, they are all connected by an overall desire to ‘picture’ light in all its natural and artificial glory. Tim Davis writes in the catalogue:

In Illilluminations I am photographing grand and gorgeous failures of light to sync up to its supposed functions: Braille billboards, odd elaborate shadows behind figurative sculptures, spring pear blossoms arc lit into oblivion, neon cones to no one. I am interested in light that obscures as it illumines, that overstates and overblows, and in some cases, that fails to appear at all. You can sift through any photographer’s amassed images and find moments when the light shifts from something that describes to something that is described; moments when the photographer has seen–or better, understood — the light.

Tim Davis was born 1969 and lives and works New York City and Tivoli, NY. He received a B.A. from Bard College (where he currently teaches), an M.F.A. from Yale University. Solo exhibitions include Jay Jopling / White Cube, London; Edward Mitterand, Geneva; Rodolphe Janssen, Brussels; Brent Sikkema, NY; and Susanne Vielmetter, LA. His work has been featured in numerous publications, including The New York Times Magazine, Artforum, and Art in America, among others, and is in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Guggenheim Museum, and The Walker Art Center, among many others.