Gagosian has announced the global representation of Cy Gavin. Following his debut solo exhibition at the gallery, which opened in February 2023 in New York, Gagosian will present an exhibition of new paintings by Gavin this fall in Rome.
In his recent work, Gavin paints metaphorical interpretations of sites that have been shaped over time by human intervention and geological or cosmic phenomena. Composed with fluid, gestural brushstrokes in striking colors, they are at times monumental in scale.
Gavin was born in Pittsburgh in 1985 and raised in Donora, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Carnegie Mellon University in 2007 and earned his MFA in 2016 from Columbia University. Following the death of his father, he traveled in 2015 to his ancestral homeland of Bermuda to research his family’s genealogy and the island’s history. The paintings he made during this period include depictions of Gibbet Island, Crow Lane, and Tucker’s Town—the latter being the site of an enclave of Black Bermudians that was destroyed in 1920 to create an exclusive golf resort. The works are marked by the legacies of enslavement, colonialism, and resistance, visualizing the creation and maintenance of similar power structures in the United States.
In 2016, Gavin relocated from New York City to New York’s Hudson Valley, where he currently lives and works. He began painting the area’s landscape, ranging from the environment around his studio to dramatic features of the region. Spanning approximately thirty feet in length, Bash Bish Falls (2019) features a panoramic view of the waterfall, frozen in winter, and a clove, or gorge. The cascade in southwestern Massachusetts is set in one of the few remaining old-growth eastern hemlock forests and is pictured on the night of a full lunar eclipse.
In 2021, Gavin’s first solo museum exhibition was organized by the Aspen Art Museum, Colorado, and included paintings of a glacial erratic boulder, transported and deposited by a melting ice sheet during the last ice age; a failing stone dam; Comet NEOWISE; and a room-size depiction of the pitch-dark recesses of a limestone cavern.
Included in the 2022 Whitney Biennial, Untitled (Snag) (2022) represents the remains of a partially dead tree located by Gavin’s studio, articulated against a field of brightly hued orange and yellow dry grasses. And for his 2023 debut exhibition with Gagosian in New York, Gavin showed works depicting the immediate vicinity of his studio, including the meadows he allowed to grow on formerly manicured lawns, saplings planted to rewild the property, and shrubs demarcating its boundaries.
About the artist
Cy Gavin was born in 1985 in Pittsburgh, and lives and works in New York’s Hudson River Valley. Collections include Baltimore Museum of Art; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Fondazione Memmo, Rome; and Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris. Solo exhibitions include Aspen Art Museum, CO (2021). Gavin’s work was included in The Lure of the Dark: Contemporary Painters Conjure the Night, MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA (2018); Between the Waters, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2018); RELATIONS: Diaspora and Painting, PHI Foundation for Contemporary Art, Montreal (2020); and the 2022 Whitney Biennial.
