Gerald Davis

Ltd Los Angeles is pleased to announce House with Buried Figure, Gerald Davis’ first solo exhibition with the gallery. Davis will present eight new large-scale acrylic and oil pastel paintings and several chalk pastel drawings.

Davis expands hispractice of delving into traumatic experiences through expressionist cartooning in the tradition of Philip Guston and Peter Saul. He continues to explore the subjects of desire, anxiety, memory and absurdity by transforming and defacing an image of a house. Previously, Davis investigated these subjects through masterfully technical hyper realistic drawings of childhood susceptibility and trauma. Now, Davis has found the ability of working while in a vulnerable, childlike mindset, freeing his hand to draw a house with paint. The paintings of the ubiquitous house are not of a specific story, rather of a shared story - an invitation to explore one’s own narrative.

While Davis was aware that young survivors of war had been asked to draw a house in order to assess their sense of self, he recently learned of the House-Tree-Person test. This projective diagnostic tool measures personality, self-perception and attitude through drawings of a house, tree, and person, as well as a series of questions to reveal their inner world.

For Davis, his house paintings include a buried figure. Sometimes so deeply buried they are virtually unrecognizable. The house serves as both a form and a view into the psyche of the inner child, creating a narrative beyond the structure that exists within the materiality of the work. Each stroke, each color, each juxtaposition – a possibility.

Davis has exhibited nationally and internationally. His work is in several public collections (Whitney Museum of American Art, Hammer Museum, and Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego) and international private collections.

He lives and works in Los Angeles.