Grenville Davey, the British artist whose work navigating Pop art and minimalism won him the Turner Prize in 1992, has died. The artist emerged amongst the Young British Artists generation, graduating from Goldsmiths College in London in 1986. Yet his sculpture was subtler and less sensational than that being produced by many of his peers: interested in symmetry and repetition, a typical Davey work would often see a pair of everyday objects rendered oversized in steel, details changed or removed, the palette kept monochrome. His Turner win was something of a shock, beating his friend and the bookies’ favourite, Damien Hirst.
By Air (1989) features two green-grey industrially-painted steel discs, each almost two metres in diameter, each with a concave form extended out from the surface. When exhibited they are seemingly casually leant, overlapping, against a gallery wall. The artist would often say he liked to ‘draw’ with steel, not always producing preliminary sketches but finding his composition in the process. Sharp (1992) features three separate elements of hand-painted cream steel bars bent so they gently swoop off the ground. Common Blue (1998–2019) is a wall mounted frame of interconnecting steel pipes, seemingly of practical purpose but ultimately illogical.
Davey produced a wide variety of public sculpture and architectural commissions, including at the Olympic Park in Stratford, East London. In 2010 he worked with a string theorist at Queen Mary University of London, and subsequently the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Cambridge, producing a body of work shown at Chelsea Space in 2014.
