TM Davy: This Marram: 2nd Floor

Van Doren Waxter is pleased to announce the gallery’s third solo exhibition with Brooklyn-based artist TM Davy, on view on the second floor at 23 East 73rd Street. The current exhibition presents a suite of new pastels and watercolors drawn from observation in Fire Island, where the artist spends time each spring and summer. The works on view include landscapes, portraits, and sunset scenes which capture the artist’s environment and close-knit community on the island. A public exhibition talk with TM Davy and MASS MoCA museum curator Susan Cross will be held on Saturday, October 12 at 2 PM, at the gallery. 

Davy is well known for his intimate, candle-lit chiaroscuro portraits of artists, friends, and family members closest to him. Love, intimacy, and friendship are persistent themes in the artist’s work, captured here in a new body of vibrant plein air pastel drawings. All works on view are in 14 x 11-inch format, a scale which the artist prefers precisely for the ease of drawing, portability, and spontaneity it allows. Works from the Davy’s ongoing “Fire Island Sunset” series capture the energy of that fleeting moment in which the sun hinges on the cusp of the ocean and horizon line. This body of sequential works, each one immortalizing a singular instant, underscores Davy’s devotion to the observation and study of light, atmosphere, time, and private contemplation. Likewise, many of Davy’s beachside figures are portrayed entering the water, incarnating one of the artist’s most beloved ideals: transcendent union of bodies with nature. His portraits celebrate his inseparable communion with his husband, Liam Davy, as well as the intimacy and bond amongst close friends; these include celebratory and tender portraits of artists such as Wolfgang Tillmans, K8 Hardy, Ryan McNamara, Nicole Eisenman, Hanna Liden and Meaghan Gragg, among others. Above all, Davy’s Fire Island series are a meditation on the power and freedom born from togetherness—between figure and landscape, mind and body, human and human.

TM DAVY (b. 1980) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He was educated at The School of Visual Arts (BFA) where he also teaches.  Davy has had solo exhibitions at Galerie Thomas Fuchs in Stuttgart, Germany (2018), Exile in Berlin, Germany (2012), and 11R in New York, NY (2014, 2017). Davy’s work has been included in numerous group exhibitions, including Nobody Promised You Tomorrow: Art 50 Years After Stonewall at the Brooklyn Museum, NY (2019); Them at Perrotin, NY; Fire at Company Gallery, New York (2019); The Lure of the Dark: Contemporary Painters Conjure the Night at MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA (2018); Con Amore at Aarhus Kunstmuseum, Denmark (2011); No Soul for Sale, curated by Maurizio Cattelan and Cecilia Alemani, at Tate Modern, UK (2010); X Initiative, New York (2009); and Nudes at Galeria Fortes Vilaça, São Paulo (2009). Reviews and articles on Davy’s work have been published in The New York Times, Artforum, Art in America, and The Village Voice, among others.