Ian Davenport — Broad Line Etchings For Sale

Explore Ian Davenport's Broad Line Etchings, a 2024 group of prints published by Cristea Roberts Gallery, London, that includes De-da-de (Black), De-da-de (White), Tra-la-la (Black), Tra-la-la (White), and White Tide. The series showcases a more graphic, hard-edged register within Davenport's practice, built from broad, adjacent bands of flat colour rather than the poured, cascading lines most associated with his paintings.

Each etching was made by inking up a plate and printing in carefully aligned sequences, a laborious process suited to the series' emphasis on crisp, geometric colour blocks. Davenport is understood to have produced around forty separate colour studies for the group before narrowing his selection down to the five or six variations that became the finished editions. De-da-de (Black), for instance, has an image and paper size of 75.3 x 64.2 cm and was published in an edition of 30, as was Tra-la-la (Black).

A defining feature of the series is its deliberate use of colour temperature: the broad, adjacent bands were composed so that "hot" and "cold" colour areas sit directly beside one another, creating a visual friction that plays against the flatness of the etched surface. This interest in colour contrast and rhythm connects Broad Line Etchings to Davenport's wider body of print work — from his early Ovals to the later Mirror Enamel and Pathway screenprints — all of which treat colour combination as a subject in its own right rather than simply a decorative choice. The result is a series that is at once restrained in form and rich in the same optical charge that has made Davenport's paintings and prints widely sought after by collectors and institutions internationally.