Adam's Important Irish Art Auction Tuesday 27th March 2018

86 88 COLIN DAVIDSON PPRUA (B.1968) Looking South towards Belfast Lough from Windsor House Oil on canvas, 167.5 x 183cm (66 x 72’’) Signed, inscribed with title and dated 2004 verso Provenance: With the Tom Caldwell Gallery, Belfast (label verso). No Continuing City, his well-received solo exhibition at the Tom Caldwell Gallery in 2004, marked Colin Davidson’s most extensive and concentrated engagement with his native city, Belfast, to that point. Amanda Croft commented in the exhibition catalogue that “it is the architectural framework of the city as a whole, its intersecting network of roads, rivers and bridges, and its geographical setting that attracts him, not the social hustle and bustle of its inhabitants” [1] . Looking Towards Belfast Lough from Windsor House is dominated by its unusual aerial view into the City Hall, luminous in the winter sunshine, with a complex geometric analysis of the streets in the foreground echoed as the image of the city stretches away towards the river. Amanda Croft noted that the present painting benefited from its large scale and that the “sheer breadth of these urban vistas is matched by the physical scale of Davidson’s canvases” [2] . Even for those familiar with the city, the high vantage points from which Davidson was able to draw and paint Belfast set them apart from the everyday experience of most people. While the paintings are topo- graphically accurate there are “many areas of these paintings which function in a purely abstract manner” [3] and they become images that are true to the city on many different levels, as much concerned with “the energy and nature of the city as a whole, as they are about replicating preconceived notions of an image of Belfast” [4] . € 7,000 - 10,000 [1] Amanda Croft, ‘Introduction’, Colin Davidson – No Continuing City, Tom Caldwell Gallery, Belfast, 2004 [2] Ibid. [3] Dickon Hall, ‘Introduction’, New Paintings by Colin Davidson, Solomon Gallery, Dublin, 2005 [4] Ibid.