Todi welcomes one of the protagonists of the British contemporary art scene: from August 31 to October 5, 2025, the Sala delle Pietre in the Palazzo del Capitano will in fact host Holding our Centre, a solo exhibition by Ian Davenport (Sidcup, 1966), a Kent-born artist and a central figure in the generation of Young British Artists. The appointment is part of the program of the 39th edition of the Todi Festival and is linked to the ongoing commitment of the Beverly Pepper Projects Foundation, which for years has worked alongside the City and the Festival in hosting big names in international sculpture and painting.
The solo exhibition, curated by Marco Tonelli, presents to the public some of Davenport’s celebrated painting-installations, works that the artist calls Painting with floors, works somewhere between two-dimensionality and sculpture. The exhibit in the Hall of Stones also features a selection of Splats, works on paper characterized by explosions of color and drippings that testify to the artist’s ongoing experimentation with materials and media. Completing the project is also a video installation that will animate, during the days of the Todi Festival from August 30 to September 7, the Palazzo del Capitano in Piazza del Popolo, transforming the heart of the city into a chromatic and interactive stage.
The projection is designed as an adaptation for the Todi space of a project already presented in London in 2019 at the Flannels Store on Oxford Street. The work reworks the typical vertical bands of Davenport’s paintings through electronic chromatics that develop in dialogue with the architecture and the audience. An immersive and dynamic dimension that recalls the community function of the fresco cycles, capable of generating a collective experience of participation.
Davenport’s presence in Todi reinforces an already established path. In recent years, the city has hosted leading figures such as Arnaldo Pomodoro, Fabrizio Plessi and Mark di Suvero, consolidating a vocation that interweaves historical memory and the avant-garde. Silvano Spada’s return to direct the Todi Festival, of which he was the creator, marks another important step in the construction of an increasingly open and international cultural identity.
The Beverly Pepper Projects Foundation accompanies the exhibition with a calendar of free collateral events. Guided tours of contemporary venues in the city, workshops for children and educational projects aimed at schools are planned. The intent is to strengthen the link between the presence of a world-renowned artist and the local community, creating opportunities for knowledge and participation. The Todi solo exhibition, with free admission, thus offers an opportunity to meet up close with an author who has been able to redefine the boundaries of contemporary painting.
Ian Davenport is an author who has managed to combine experimentation with international recognition. After graduating from Goldsmiths College of Art in London in 1988, that same year he took part in Freeze, the celebrated exhibition curated by Damien Hirst that gave visibility to the Young British Artists group. In 1990 he presented his first solo show at Waddington Galleries in London, and in 1991 he was nominated for the Turner Prize, setting a record as the youngest artist nominated for the prestigious award, at only twenty-four years old. His career has been characterized by an ongoing exploration of abstract painting, investigated as process and as material. His works arise from lines of acrylic paint dripped onto sloping surfaces, creating complex compositions of colors and layers that reach beyond the canvas to engage the surrounding space. Over the past decade Davenport has complemented this research with an extensive production of silkscreens and etchings, producing one of the most extensive graphic collections of his generation.
Davenport’s international career has led him to exhibitions at such prominent institutions as Dundee Contemporary Arts in 1999, Ikon Gallery in Birmingham in 2004, Tate Liverpool in 2000, and Dallas Contemporary in 2018. Davenport has also made large-scale commissions, such as Poured Lines on London’s Southwark Street, a 48-meter-long permanent public work made in 2006. In 2017 he was present at the Venice Biennale with an installation of more than 1,000 stripes, commissioned by Swatch, for which he also created a special Swatch Art series watch. Notable collaborations have enriched his career, including hand-decorating a series of porcelain plates for the Meissen manufactory in 2016, a project sponsored by the South London Gallery, and creating a limited-edition bag for Christian Dior’s Lady Art project. In 2010 Davenport took part in a residency program at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation in Connecticut, an experience that further solidified her interest in the relationship between color, surface and perception.
His works now appear in major public and private collections: from the Arts Council of Great Britain to the Tate in London, from the Centre Pompidou in Paris to the National Museum Wales in Cardiff, to MoMA in New York and the Dallas Museum of Art. In 2014, Thames Hudson published the first comprehensive monograph on his work, consolidating his position as one of the most influential abstract artists of his generation. In Italy, Davenport is represented by Luca Tommasi Gallery in Milan.
“I am delighted,” says Ian Davenport, “to have been invited by the Beverly Pepper Projects Foundation and the city of Todi to exhibit my work. For me, Italy has always been the home of artistic brilliance, and the Italian Renaissance painters have had a huge influence on my work. The inspiration for the colors in my works often comes from artists such as Beato Angelico, Lorenzo Monaco and Sandro Botticelli. My paintings explore the physical materiality of painting, sometimes going beyond two-dimensionality, thus taking on a sculptural form that restores a dynamic intervention in the exhibition space.”
“Ian Davenport,” says Antonino Ruggiano, Mayor of Todi, “gives the Todi Festival 2025 a poster full of lights and colors, iconically anticipating the figure of a special edition with which the city rediscovers Silvano Spada artistic director and sees the collaboration with the Beverly Pepper Projects Foundation consolidated. The name of another internationally renowned artist is added to the extraordinary gallery of prestigious signatures, major exhibitions and contemporary artworks that have enlivened Todi over the past half century.”
“I thank the Beverly Pepper Projects Foundation,” says Silvano Spada, Todi Festival Artistic Director, “for its tribute to the Festival with the creation of the Manifesto signed by the British artist Ian Davenport: a gesture that allows me to continue in my focus on contemporary art with, among others, the names of Alighiero Boetti, Kounellis, Pistoletto, authors of famous posters of some of my Festivals. But, above all and with tenderness, I am pleased to recall that, back in 1987, Beverly was my very first fan and my social/cultural reference of my private or representative meetings in the sociality of the Todi of that time and, at that time, unknown to me.”
“We are proud,” emphasizes Elisa Veschini, President of the Beverly Pepper Projects Foundation, “to reaffirm our prestigious partnership with the Todi Festival, an alliance that continues to grow with enthusiasm and passion. It is an honor for us to be able to work alongside a Festival that, with the new direction of Silvano Spada, is enriched with new energy and visions. His inspiring guidance stimulates us to continue an enlightened path that, for years, has brought some of the greatest names in contemporary art to Todi, making this city an international point of reference for culture. We thank master Ian Davenport for accepting our invitation, his work will contribute once again, to this extraordinary project that celebrates art in all its forms.”
“Ian Davenport,” recalls Marco Tonelli, Curator of the project and scientific curator of the Beverly Pepper Projects Foundation, “is one of the most important British abstract painters active since the late 1980s, internationally recognized, whose works manage to seduce, almost magically, and activate the gaze of both specialists and laymen, thanks to their dynamic colors and the processes of painting always in view, as if the viewer were part of the making of the work and the work something alive and still in progress. An engaging art then, almost participatory, in which the passage of time and the immediacy of experience seem to constitute the substance of the painting, holding appearance and structure in balance.”
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| Todi hosts exhibition of Ian Davenport, one of the greatest living British artists |
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