Cy Gavin

Essay by Hilton Als

Some time ago, I would read and reread Barbara Novak. Novak is, of course, the great Americanist, author of a number of seminal books on nineteenth-century art with a special focus on American landscape painting. In works such as 1980’s Nature and Culture: American Landscape Painting, 1825–1875, Novak introduced me to transcendental masters such as Thomas Cole, and Frederic Edwin Church, and Fitz H. Lane—artists who hadn’t had much critical exposure before Novak gave them a frame.

Prior to that, American landscape painting was largely marginalized; indeed, even as late as 2000, few European collections contained works by nineteenth-century American artists, let alone the transcendentalists; there was always Caspar David Friedrich, but next to no Albert Bierstadt. Presumably The Earth and its surrounding energy and force was different in the former colonies. Standing in front of great works with Novak’s book in hand (or in my head), I studied the Hudson River School and read transcendentalist writers such as Emerson and Thoreau and Bronson Alcott, too—creators who all shared a common belief: that God was nature, and nature, God.

Image: Cy Gavin, Untitled (Beaver Dam), 2021 (detail)

Location

24 Grafton Street London

Dates

November 23—December 17, 2021

Artist

Cy Gavin

Press Release

Cy Gavin

Installation view, Cy Gavin, David Zwirner, London, 2021

Francis Alÿs, Untitled (Study for 'Don't Cross the Bridge Before You Get to the River'), 2007–2008 (detail)

Slide 2

None

Installation view, Luc Tuymans: La Pelle, Palazzo Grassi, Venice, 2019. © Palazzo Grassi. Photo by Delfino Sisto Legnani and Marco Cappelletti

William Eggleston, Untitled, c. 1971–1973 (detail)
威廉·埃格爾斯頓，《無題》，約1971-1973年（細節）

Hilma af Klint
Tree of Knowledge, No. 6, 1913-1915
Watercolor, gouache, graphite, and ink on paper
Sheet: 18 x 11 5/8 inches (45.7 x 29.5 cm)
Framed: 27 7/8 x 21 3/8 x 1 3/4 inches (70.8 x 54.3 x 4.4 cm)

Hilma af Klint
Tree of Knowledge, No. 7b, 1913-1915
Watercolor, gouache, graphite, and ink on paper
Sheet: 18 x 11 5/8 inches (45.7 x 29.5 cm)
Framed: 27 7/8 x 21 3/8 x 1 3/4 inches (70.8 x 54.3 x 4.4 cm)

Hilma af Klint
Tree of Knowledge, No. 5, 1913-1915
Watercolor, gouache, graphite, and ink on paper
Sheet: 18 x 11 5/8 inches (45.7 x 29.5 cm)
Framed: 27 7/8 x 21 3/8 x 1 3/4 inches (70.8 x 54.3 x 4.4 cm)

Artstudio

Hilma af Klint
Tree of Knowledge, 1913-1915
Watercolor, gouache, graphite, and ink on paper in eight (8) parts
Sheet: 18 x 11 5/8 inches (each) 45.7 x 29.5 cm
Framed: 27 7/8 x 21 3/8 x 1 3/4 inches (each) 70.8 x 54.3 x 4.4 cm

Installation view, Christopher Williams: Normative Models, Kestner Gesellschaft, Hanover. Photo by Maris Hutchinson

“Gavin’s canvases reimagine the encounter with the sublime as a transhistorical reckoning; here, the links between scenic possession, vision and progress are dimmed. What emerges within the shadows is the whole alluvium deposited by a colonial past that we, in its presence, are incapable of not seeing.”

—Shiv Kotecha, Frieze Magazine, 2019

Cy Gavin

Untitled (Beaver Dam), 2021

Acrylic, vinyl, and chalk on canvas

86 5/8 x 180 3/8 inches (220 x 458 cm)