Not on display
- Artist
- Alan Davie 1920–2014
- Medium
- Oil paint on board
- Dimensions
- Support: 2337 x 3200 mm
frame: 2445 x 3211 x 38 mm - Collection
- Tate
- Acquisition
- Purchased 1964
- Reference
- T00633
Display caption
By the mid-1950s recognisable symbols were appearing alongside the chance marks in Davie’s paintings. As in this painting, they did not convey specific meanings. Instead Davie considered them to be ‘primordial symbols which have many and varying meanings at different times but unknown to mankind’.
Although the central passage of this painting suggests disembowelled entrails, Davie maintains that the title was applied retrospectively. He equated sacrifice with ‘something cruel, noble, frightful, transcendent: a link between life and death, personal and universal’.
Gallery label, September 2004
Does this text contain inaccurate information or language that you feel we should improve or change? We would like to hear from you.
Features
-
Alan Davie: Entrance to a Paradise
Essay on the painter Alan Davie accompanying his BP Spotlight display at Tate Britain during 2014
Explore
- abstraction(9,912)
-
- from recognisable sources(4,517)
-
- figure(2,276)
- formal qualities(12,932)
-
- gestural(783)
- sacrifice(25)
- birth to death(1,449)
-
- death(668)
- psychology, Jung(28)
You might like
-
Alan Davie Image of the Fish God
1956 -
Alan Davie Birth of Venus
1955 -
Alan Davie Entrance for a Red Temple No. 1
1960 -
Alan Davie Black Mirror
1952 -
Alan Davie Village Myths No. 36
1983 -
Alan Davie Two Insects, Yellow
c.1950–5 -
Alan Davie Fairy Tree No. 5
1971 -
Alan Davie Entrance to a Paradise
1949 -
Alan Davie Sleep My Angel
1961–2 -
Alan Davie Night Sky on a Holiday
1948 -
Alan Davie For the Hens (trial proof)
1968 -
Alan Davie Bird Noises
1963 -
Alan Davie Interested Sperm Around an Egg
1948 -
Alan Davie Obscure Biological Function Surrounded by Nerve Impulses
1948 -
Cecil Collins Hymn
1953