Paul Davies: Layers in Motion

CASSANDRA BIRD  is delighted to present Layers in Motion, a solo exhibition by Paul Davies, marking the artist’s second exhibition with the gallery and his first solo presentation in Sydney in five years. Bringing together an immersive installation, a new series of paintings, and dynamic bronze sculptures, the exhibition offers a compelling articulation of Davies’ engagement with process, material, and the spatial conditions of image making.

In Layers in Motion, Davies advances a practice that is both materially rigorous and conceptually expansive. Through a refined interplay of construction and erasure, his works occupy a liminal terrain between architecture and abstraction, memory and materiality.

Davies’ practice is grounded in an ongoing investigation of architecture and the built environment, from which he extracts a visual language of line, structure, and form. These elements operate in a space that is neither strictly representational nor wholly abstract; rather, they function as generative frameworks through which space is constructed, deconstructed, and reimagined. His paintings unfold through the accumulation and erosion of layered surfaces, where gestures are repeatedly applied, obscured, and revealed. This iterative process foregrounds temporality, positioning each work as both an image and an index of its own making.

The introduction of four bronze sculptures extends these investigations into three dimensions, translating the artist’s linear and structural vocabulary into physical form. Here, gestures that remain provisional within the paintings acquire weight, density, and permanence, effectively activating a dialogue between two  and three-dimensional space. This interplay underscores Davies’enquiry into the tension between solidity and transience, presence and absence, intensifying the viewer’s spatial and perceptual experience.

Central to Davies’ approach is the notion of painting as a site of memory. Architectural references, whether drawn from observed environments or internalised impressions are translated into compositions that oscillate between the real and the imagined. These works resist fixed interpretation, instead proposing spatial fields that are contingent and in continual flux. The layering of paint operates simultaneously as a formal strategy and conceptual device, embedding personal histories within the material surface while withholding them from full resolution.

Davies's work has been acquired by The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, the University of California Irvine, Institute and Museum of California Art, Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Palm Springs Art Museum, Crocker Art Museum, MAK Center for Art and Architecture and the Laguna Art Museum. In 2016 he completed a residency at the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture Phoenix and work from this is now held in the permanent collection at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art and McClelland Sculpture Park + Gallery. In 2013 he was awarded a residency at the Cite Internationale des Arts, Paris by the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Davies was featured with Luc Tuymans and Peter Doig in the essay 'Limbo Architecture – Painters of Modernism' by Aaron Betsky, director of the Cincinnati Art Museum (2006–14), for the May 2014 edition of Architecture Review.