London, Sotheby’s, Sculpture and Sculptors’ Drawings from The Ingram Collection, 10 – 21 January 2011;
Chichester, Otter Gallery, Ingram Loan Exhibition, March – April 2012;
Woking, The Lightbox, The Road to Abstraction, 21 May – 24 July 2016;
Woking, The Lightbox, Show us what you’re made of! 26 July – 2 October 2016;
Hastings, Jerwood Gallery, Century: 100 Modern British Artists, 23 October 2016 – 8 January 2017;
Hull, Ferens Art Gallery, Reflection: British Art in an Age of Change, 17 August 2019 – 5 January 2020
John Davies’ work is centred on the human figure, and the human head in its myriad forms has been a main concern throughout his career. In the catalogue to an exhibition of Davies’ sculptures at Marlborough Fine Art in April 1989, Norbert Lynton commented on the larger-than-life heads, of which this is earlier than those in the exhibition: ‘They do not overpower us with their grandeur or with the force of the artist’s expressiveness. Their forms are not extreme, their expression individual but not emphatic. Their size does not hold us in awe. It affects us as closeness, intimacy, an interest close to love. We cannot remain strangers with them. They may seem mute at first; once we engage with them they respond so vividly that we do not know how to cope with their being art’. Talking about this piece, Chris Ingram says, ‘After a few years of collecting art, I realised that the sculptural side of the collection was particularly strong. Sculpture often has what my curator Jo Baring and I call the ‘Pow Factor’. Most exhibitions need one or two pieces which stop people in their tracks and this John Davies Head absolutely achieves that. I also really enjoyed meeting the artist a few months ago and he was delighted that his work was on public display as part of The Ingram Collection’.
