Michael Davidson

Davidson for many years resided between London England and Montreux Switzerland. It was during this time that Davidson first experienced many of the great paintings of Europe, initiating what would become an abiding commitment to the development of his personal approach to painting. Upon returning to Canada, Davidson completed a degree in Fine Art at the University of Guelph and now resides in Toronto.

In 1999 Michael Davidson was responsible for the exhibition TRANSlinear, which he co-curated with Art Historian Ihor Holubizky, an exhibition which toured nationally. Davidson’s work can be found in collections in Canada, the United States, Australia, England and has exhibited in London and New York. Davidson’s paintings are featured in the book entitled 26, published in the spring of 2007, where he refers to abstraction, his abstraction, as the factual language of the invisible.

Excerpted from Interior Paramour
The Abstract Paintings of Michael Davidson
written by Donald Brackett, 2008

Michael Davidson is painting in the shadow of the history of painting and he is making work which yields images of where modernism might have gone, if it had been allowed to continue on its trajectory. By so doing, he is also offering a renewed and highly pertinent fragment of pure abstract meaning for a new and dangerously fragmented time, simply by so diligently following that trajectory.

The historical traces of that trajectory reveal a mythical voyage almost as lofty as the odes of epic poetry used to convey the mythological cycle upon which so many of this artist’s paintings are loosely based and which they evoke so boldly. By turning the voyage inward, Davidson has touched upon a form of perpetual travel which contains its destination in every brushstroke.

This focuses our attention in the most intense way possible, in a way that allows a unique rendezvous to take place. Perhaps that is essentially what Rimbaud meant by the more narrow the ray of focus, the more vigilant the light.

That kind of light, the kind of unique glow that seeps out of Michael Davidson’s works, shines into the darkness of only one place. These paintings are postcards from a place that the great American modernist poet Wallace Stevens wrote about in Harmonium, in 1923, from “Final Soliloquy Of The Interior Paramour” :

“Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves. We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole, a knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous. Within its vital boundary, in the mind.”

CURRICULUM VITAE
Born: London, Ontario, Canada

Education
1984 -1988 BFA, Honour’s Degree, University of Guelph, Canada

Solo Exhibitions
2011 Zencrusher, General hardware Contemporary, Solo, Toronto, Canada.
2011 Stillness Wave, Transit gallery, Solo, Hamilton, Canada.
2009 What Is Kept, Transit Gallery, Solo, Hamilton, Canada.
2002 New Paintings, Katharine Mulherin Gallery, Solo, Toronto, Canada.

Group Exhibitions
2011 AutoPlasmic, McMaster Museum of Art, Hamilton, Canada.
2010 Group Show, Transit gallery, Hamilton, Canada.
2009 Group Show, Transit Gallery, Hamilton, Canada.
2008 Giant, 10th Anniversary, Katharine Mulherin Gallery, Toronto, Canada.
2008 Group Show, Transit Gallery, Hamilton, Canada.
2007 Building Picturing, The Painting Center, New York, New York, USA.
2006 Colony, Sixty4steps, two person, Toronto, Canada.
2005 Crossing The Line, The Painting Center, New York, New York,USA.
2004 TRiFECTA, preview, Zsa Zsa Gallery, Toronto, Canada.
2003 Advent, Halde Gallery, Widen, Zurich, Switzerland.
2002 20th Anniversary Exhibition, Triangle New York, Brooklyn, NY, USA.
2002 Summer Show, Katharine Mulherin Gallery, Toronto Canada.
2001 Inaugural Exhibition, MacLaren Art Centre, Barrie, Canada.
2001 Paintings Painted, Platform Gallery, two person, London, England.
2001 TRANSlinear, Kelowna Art Gallery, Kelowna, British Columbia,
Cambridge Art Gallery, Cambridge, Ontario, PlugIn Gallery, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada.
2000 TRANSlinear, The Mendel Art Gallery, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan,Thomson Memorial Art Gallery, Owen Sound, Ontario, Canada.
1999 TRANSlinear McMaster Museum of Art, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.
1999 Resolute, Platform Gallery, London, England.
1998 Acquisitions, Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto, Canada.
1997 Invitational, Sable-Castelli Gallery, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
1994 MUD, Adelaide Street East, painting collective event, Toronto, Canada.
1994 Searching For My Mother’s Garden, Mississauga, Canada.

Related Experience
2011 AutoPlasmic, McMaster Museum of Art, Hamilton, Canada, Curator.
2008 Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, Vermont, USA, residency.
2008 CB2, included in Carte Blanche 2, Magenta Foundation, Toronto, Canada.
2008 TIAF, Odon Wagner Contemporary, Toronto, Canada.
2007 TIAF, Odon Wagner Contemporary, Toronto, Canada.
2007 Walter Tandy Murch, research project with Ihor Holubizky,
California, USA.
2007 26, Michael Davidson, book launch, Translinear Publishing, David Mirvish Books, Toronto, Canada.
2006 Eighteen Works, installation with Nicole Collins, Royal Bank of Canada, Toronto, Canada.
2004 Death In The Studio, N. Lederer, H. Priesch, book, Vienna, Austria, New York, New York, USA.
2002 Website: HYPERLINK “http://www.michaeldavidson.net” www.michaeldavidson.net . Launch.
2002 Triangle, New York, New York, USA, residency.
2002 Abstraction In the 20th Century, University of Toronto, guest lecturer.
2002 Through the Translinear, Toronto School of Art, guest lecturer.
2002-1999 TRANSlinear, Co-Curator with Ihor Holubizky, touring in Canada.

Selected Collections
Gesta J. Abols, Barristers and Solicitors
Art Gallery of the Region of Peel
Cardinal Factor Corporation
CIBC World Markets, BCE Place
Donovan Collection, St. Michael’s College
Formedic Communications INC.
MacLaren Art Centre
McCarthy Tetrault, Barristers and Solicitors
Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art
Ontario College of Art and Design
PCL Constructors Canada Inc.
Robert McLaughlin Gallery
Seneca College, Newnham Campus
Tom Thomson Memorial Gallery

Private collections in Australia, Canada, England, and United States.