Encounters with Ivor Davies

Disgrifiad Saesneg / English Description

A volume of individual memories and critical accounts by artists, writers and friends about Ivor Davies and his art, illustrated by numerous artworks, many never reproduced before.

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Bywgraffiad yr Awdur / Author Biography

Editor: Helen Phillips is Professor Emerita in the School of English, Communication and Philosophy, Cardiff University. Her research and publications are in medieval and modern writing and culture.

Adolygiad y Cyhoeddwr / Publisher Review

At the centre of some of the most significant art movements of the post-war period, Ivor Davies is one of Wales’ most important and respected contemporary artists. His own significant encounters include his 1967 meeting and 42 years shared life with Tamara Krikorian, a pioneer video artist and Director of Cywaith Cymru, and also his 1977 meeting with Paul and Peter Davies, to which he attributes his art’s turn towards more overt engagement with Wales and Welsh political issues. They invited Ivor to join them in Beca. Four of today’s Beca artists, Peter Davies, Iwan Bala, Peter Telfer and Sara Rhoslyn, contribute to this book. It takes us on an impressive historical visual journey into not only the life and works of Ivor, who celebrates his 90th birthday this November, but also the vigour and glory of contemporary art in Wales during the past eight decades. Ivor Davies is a Welsh-speaking Welsh artist, art historian, activist, teacher and writer. His work includes abstraction, surrealism, etching, performance, and sculptural and kinetic constructions. Born in Treharris in 1935, he currently lives and works in Penarth. After studying at Cardiff College of Art and Swansea College of Art, 1952 and 1957, he taught and studied at the University of Lausanne, 1959-1961. From 1963 to 1978 he was lecturer in art history at the University of Edinburgh, completed a PhD on the Russian avant-garde and became first curator of the University’s Talbot Rice Art Centre. Co-organiser of the 1966 London Destruction in Art Symposium, his 1960s multi-media artworks, using kinetic elements, film, performance, and destructive forces, notably explosives, engaged with principles of destruction / creation, mutability and contemporary socio-political challenges. From 1978 to 1988 he was Head of Cultural Studies at Gwent College of Higher Education (now part of University of South Wales). Between 1995 and 2014, he was Vice-President and later President of the Royal Cambrian Academy of Art. While working all his career on abstracts and on works that integrate the visual with poems and words, there have also been periods of intensive specific concentration: on still lifes in the 70s and 80s; on paintings of direct political challenge, and works celebrating great Welsh figures – Welsh princes and saints, poets and political activists – in the period especially since 2000. Drawing on cultural memory and history, he creates art that is often powerfully unexpected and unconventional. Ivor believes the past -- history, language, literature and mythology – is inseparable from modern issues. In his Legends from the White Book exhibition, 1992, Taranis brought together John Jenkins and the Celtic thunder god Taranis. At the 2002 National Eisteddfod he won the Gold Medal for Fine Art, using the money, and continuing ever since, to fund the annual Ivor Davies Prize at the National Eisteddfod ‘for work conveying the spirit of the struggle for the language, culture and politics of Wales’. He was made an MBE in 2007. Honorary Fellowship, Cardiff University, 2019. His Silent Explosion exhibition, November 2015 – March 2016, was the largest solo artist exhibition held at the National Museum of Wales Cardiff.