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Ian Davenport
Shortlisted: 1991

Davenport was one of a group of young artists who maintained the tradition of abstract paintings during the late 1980s and early 1990s. He works with paint which has been allowed to drip and flow, but he always exerts a degree of control over it; as he says 'The structure of the painting is formed by the paint running into itself. Each of my paintings has evolved from a very deliberate process, not from intuitive marking'.

Ian Davenport was born in Sidcup, Kent in 1966. He attended Norwich College of Art and Design from 1984 to 1985, and then graduated from Goldsmiths College in 1988. He was shorlisted in 1991 on the basis of his ability to demonstrate 'the expressive possibilities of abstract paintings,' as seen in his debut exhibition at Waddington Galleries.

This information has been taken from The Turner Prize: Twenty Years, by Virginia Button, Tate Publishing, 2003.

View Ian Davenport in the Tate Collection