Ian Davis incorporates the systems and geometry of minimalism within a descriptive style of painting that is timeless in its simplicity. His first one-person show in New York includes twelve paintings produced within the past year as well as a large work on paper.

An illustrated catalogue, featuring a conversation with the artist, will be published by the gallery on the occasion of this exhibition. Favoring the depiction of entropic situations over specific narrations, in Davis’s universe systems crash and things fall apart. Whether populated or not (very often by groups of identically dressed men), all of his works retain a strong masculine presence, tinged by sardonic humor.

In Auditorium, hundreds of men sit in chairs, facing a central podium, waiting for the announcement that is never made or the leader who never appears. Two related works, Corporation and Doldrum, depict archaic industrial structures, the former a benign observation of what a factory does and the latter, a more sinister rendering of what a factory is.

Davis’s figures are iconic representations - soldiers in period costumes, prisoners in stripes, businessmen in skinny black suits - in which the uniform is a formal device that underscores his interest in ideas rather than individuals. Patterning and repetition are used to engender structure and meaning while providing the artist with a kind of trancelike process that enables him to become hypnotically involved in the act of painting itself.