Christopher Davison usually works small. His drawings and prints are dark, fairy tale dreamscapes that involve enormous numbers of details made with a wide variety of mostly tiny marks. But when the opportunity arose to create a wall-scale piece — a mural, in fact, on a gallery wall — Davison took a leap of faith and plunged right in. The resulting black and white mural in Gallery 817 at University of the Arts was a triumph of content, style, imagination and just plain hard work — a perfect scaled-up translation of the artist’s dreamy and threatening aesthetic into gargantuan proportions.
Davison’s show at Gallery 817 is over, and his mural is now gone, painted over in preparation for the next gallery show. But because the artist took some videos of the piece in progress you can see the mural virtually come alive on the wall — it’s a dramatic 2-minute time-lapse video of a piece that undergoes surprising changes including one that will take your breath away for its savage — but ultimately right — decision. We loved seeing the mural and asked Chris whether he’d repeat the labor intensive project. He said yes, and we hope it happens…hello out there, want a really great mural?
Brawler (Time Lapse Drawing By Christopher Davison) from christopher davison on Vimeo.
Over the years, we’ve seen Davison’s work grow in sophistication as it’s grown in confidence. While Chris has always flirted with death and the evil angels, his fascination with human nature and the human psyche is what fascinates us in these seductive works.
Davison has a gallery in New York and a gallery in Los Angeles. It is shocking that he has no representation in Philadelphia–we can’t imagine why.
