Robin Greenwood reviews Alan Davie & Albert Irvin at Gimpel Fils, London, on view through June 15, 2013.
Greenwood writes that the work of Davie and Irvin "jarringly at odds… On the one hand you have Davie, able to conjure at will endlessly inventive and varied assemblages of marks, forms, splashes and drips, spatial motifs and recessions, in and out of the picture plane; on the other is Irvin, with a relentless repetition of flat motifs, flat paint, flat colour. The only parallels I can draw between the two of them rests upon a consideration of their respective careers, since in both their cases their early work is by far their best."