Artist : Alan Davie (Scottish, 1920–2014)
Artwork Title : Mask
Year : 1977
Medium : Paintings / Oil on Canvas
Dimensions : 101cm. x 76cm.
Description : Alan Davie’s Mask (1977) belongs to a particularly significant period in the Scottish artist’s exploration of masks, archetypal imagery and symbolic forms. Davie had produced a number of works centred around the idea of the mask during the 1970s, including his Guru Mask and Figure Mask works, with the motif becoming part of his wider investigation into symbols that recur across different cultures.
Executed in oil on canvas, Mask brings together overlapping face-like forms, repeated eye motifs and sweeping bands of pink, blue, white, ochre and black. Rather than presenting a conventional portrait, Davie constructs an almost ritualistic image from fragmented and interconnected forms, allowing multiple possible figures and faces to emerge from the composition.
Davie believed in the existence of an archetypal visual language, drawing inspiration from sources including shamanism, Zen Buddhism, ancient cultures and Jungian ideas surrounding the collective unconscious. Combined with the improvisational freedom he developed as a jazz musician, these influences helped create the instinctive and highly individual visual language seen here.
Painted in 1977, Mask is a compelling example of this important strand of Davie’s practice: bold, enigmatic and deliberately open to interpretation.
Artist : Alan Davie (Scottish, 1920–2014)
Artwork Title : Mask
Year : 1977
Medium : Paintings / Oil on Canvas
Dimensions : 101cm. x 76cm.
Description : Alan Davie’s Mask (1977) belongs to a particularly significant period in the Scottish artist’s exploration of masks, archetypal imagery and symbolic forms. Davie had produced a number of works centred around the idea of the mask during the 1970s, including his Guru Mask and Figure Mask works, with the motif becoming part of his wider investigation into symbols that recur across different cultures.
Executed in oil on canvas, Mask brings together overlapping face-like forms, repeated eye motifs and sweeping bands of pink, blue, white, ochre and black. Rather than presenting a conventional portrait, Davie constructs an almost ritualistic image from fragmented and interconnected forms, allowing multiple possible figures and faces to emerge from the composition.
Davie believed in the existence of an archetypal visual language, drawing inspiration from sources including shamanism, Zen Buddhism, ancient cultures and Jungian ideas surrounding the collective unconscious. Combined with the improvisational freedom he developed as a jazz musician, these influences helped create the instinctive and highly individual visual language seen here.
Painted in 1977, Mask is a compelling example of this important strand of Davie’s practice: bold, enigmatic and deliberately open to interpretation.
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