Gene Davis Furniture
American, 1920-1985
Davis was born in Washington D.C. in 1920 and spent nearly all his life there. Before he began to paint in 1949, he worked as a sportswriter, covering the Washington Football Team and other local teams. Working as a journalist in the late 1940s, he covered the Roosevelt and Truman presidential administrations, and was often President Truman's partner for poker games. His first art studio was in his apartment on Scott Circle; later he worked out of a studio on Pennsylvania Avenue.
Davis's first solo exhibition of drawings was at the Dupont Theater Gallery in 1952, and his first exhibition of paintings was at Catholic University in 1953. A decade later he participated in the "Washington Color Painters" exhibit at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art in Washington, DC, which traveled to other venues around the US, and launched the recognition of the Washington Color School as a regional movement in which Davis was a central figure. The Washington painters were among the most prominent of the mid-century color field painters. Though, he worked in a variety of media and styles, including ink, oil, acrylic, video, and collage, Davis is best known by far for his acrylic paintings (mostly on canvas) of colorful vertical stripes, which he began to paint in 1958. The paintings typically repeat particular colors to create a sense of rhythm and repetition with variations. One of the best-known of his paintings, "Black Grey Beat" (1964), owned by the Smithsonian American Art Museum reinforces these musical comparisons in its title. The pairs of alternating black and grey stripes are repeated across the canvas, and recognizable even as other colors are substituted for black and grey, and returned to even as the repetition of dark and light pairs is here and there broken by sharply contrasting colors.
In 1972 Davis created Franklin's Footpath, which was at the time the world's largest artwork, by painting colorful stripes on the street in front of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the world's largest painting, Niagara (43,680 square feet), in a parking lot in Lewiston, NY. His "micro-paintings", at the other extreme, were as small as 3/8 of an inch square.
For a public work in a different medium altogether, he designed the color patterns of the "Solar Wall," a set of tubes filled with dyed water and backlit by fluorescent lights, at the Muscarelle Museum of Art at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia.
Davis began teaching in 1966 at the Corcoran School of Art, where he became a permanent member of the faculty. His works are in the collections of, among others, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, The Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, MN, The Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller Empire State Plaza Art Collection in Albany, NY, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
He died on April 6, 1985 in Washington, DC.(Biography provided by Georgetown Frame Shoppe)
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Dealer: Gottlieb Gallery
Gene Davis Pencil Signed and Numbered Limited Edition Exhibition Poster
By Gene Davis
Located in Hudson, NY
This poster for an exhibition undertaken by the Smithsonian Institution and was produced as a Resident Associates Program Exhibit for the organizations 10th anniversary. The work is pencil signed and numbered 80 of 200. Davis was born in Washington DC in 1920 and died in the city he gave so much to in 1985. A major 20th-century figure in American painting Davis's contributions to Washington were invaluable in helping to establish DC as a center for contemporary art. Davis is also recognized as a prime mover in the national and international Color Abstract Movement and his ascendance to prominence started in the 1960s. He was never formally trained and learned his craft by constant gallery and museum visits and later said that this lack of boundaries from education freed him from any limitation on his work or process. Davis worked within the loosely formed Washington color school of painters which included other artists like Kenneth Nolan...
Category
1970s American Vintage Gene Davis Furniture
Materials
Metal
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Gene Davis furniture for sale on 1stDibs.
Gene Davis furniture are available for sale on 1stDibs. These distinctive items are frequently made of paper and are designed with extraordinary care. There are many options to choose from in our collection of Gene Davis furniture, although brown editions of this piece are particularly popular. Many of the original furniture by Gene Davis were created in the mid-century modern style in united states during the 20th century. If you’re looking for additional options, many customers also consider furniture by Sam Francis, Steve Schapiro, and Tony Rosenthal. Prices for Gene Davis furniture can differ depending upon size, time period and other attributes — on 1stDibs, these items begin at $750 and can go as high as $120,000, while a piece like these, on average, fetch $8,000.