Not on display
- Artist
- Alan Davie 1920–2014
- Medium
- Oil paint on board
- Dimensions
- Support: 2337 × 3200 mm
frame: 2445 × 3211 × 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
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Alan Davie: Entrance to a Paradise
Essay on the painter Alan Davie accompanying his BP Spotlight display at Tate Britain during 2014
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