Marcus Davies has been photographing for over 25 years and each body of work is in itself technically brilliant and totally diverse from the other, the mastery of his photography and printing skills shines through.
His distinctive black and white images are an oblique interpretation of the ‘figure’ in both cityscape and landscape in the world around him. For ten years Davies traveled throughout Europe, capturing scenes from his own characteristic perspective. Taken from a high and detached vantage point, Davies’s photographs catch reality off-guard and report back from the abstract corners of unmitigated sensation. Characters captured in these scenes become elements of a wider composition, where superfluous details are stripped to reveal a timeless image, contributing to his unique style.
In Davies' Animals Series he excludes unnecessary detail from his images still further with his minimalist animal portraits. These highly abstract and graphic images reveal figures caught in a play of light and shade, positive and negative. These portraits with their striped down simplicity, combined with Davies' mastery of photography, breathe playful life in to each and every one of these animals. This enables us to reach inside ourselves and see the beauty in the everyday, the beauty in the abstract simplistic form.
In all of Marcus Davies work, his main interest is the visual balance of each individual composition, there is no socio-political message or investigation of complex personal narratives. The photographs are about the very language of photography; light and form.
“You young people believe that art should talk about society or politics. But that is wrong. Art is to dance!” Josef Albers c.1971
Davies has exhibited in The Netherlands and widely in the UK and his work is represented in many key collections including Citibank, New York & London, The Victoria & Albert Museum and The Saatchi Collection, London.
