APRIL 30 THROUGH JUNE 13 1998 |
| For painters Drew Beattie and Daniel Davidson, "two heads are better than one, four hands better than two. "Since 1989, the New York-based duo have pursued an unusual creative partnership, working together and in alternation on their paintings and collages. The results are densely layered, free-wheeling works which reflect Beattie & Davidson's improvisational approach and blur conventional lines of authorship. The artists' exquisite corpse aesthetic embraces accident and contradiction, making their paintings stylistic free-for-alls, spontaneously careening from the representational to the abstract to the cartoon-like. Beattie and Davidson take obvious pleasure in their collaboration and, like jazzmen trading riffs, each seems to inspire the other to ever more fantastical painterly high notes. It is the viewer's pleasure to dissect these complex and often confounding performances. A fully illustrated catalogue with an essay by Lawrence Rinder and and interview with the artists by David Humphrey examines Beattie and Davidson's latest work and their close collaborative relationship. |
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| Beattie & Davidson began working together in 1989, when Beattie was an instructor at the San Francisco Art Institute and Davidson a student. They currently live and work in New York. In recent years, they have had solo exhibitions at Germans Van Eck and White Columns in New York, the University Art Museum of UC Berkeley, and Gallery Paula Anglim in San Francisco. They have also participated in numerous group shows including exhibitions at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, The Drawing Center, and The Museum of Contemporary Art De Beyerd in Breda, the Netherlands. They are recipients of awards from the Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation and the Metropolitan Museum of Art and have enjoyed artist residencies at P.S. 1 and the American Academy in Rome. |
smart art press catalogue