Todi (PG) confirms her vocation as promoter of contemporary art. The collaboration relationship that has been established between the Municipality of Todi, the Todi Festival and the Beverly Pepper Project Foundation has already brought to the city of international implant artists such as Arnaldo Pomodoro, Fabrizio Piessi, Mark di Suvero.
For 2025, Todi welcomes Ian Daveport (Sidcup, UK, 1966), one of the most relevant British authors, already belonging to the
group Young British Artist, who signed the manifesto for the 39th edition of the Todi Festival At the head of which Silvano Spada, his historic creator and director returns from this year.
Ian Davenport, who returns to public spaces in Italy, after the 2022 exhibition at the Cloister of Bramante in Rome, prepared a series of initiatives of great interest for Todi.
The first is his personalentitled Holding center, edited by Marco Tonelli, scientific curator of the Beverly Pepper Project Foundation, scheduled from 31 August to 5 October 2025, in the Sala delle Pietrewhere he will present some of his famous-installation paintings, halfway between two-dimensionality and sculpture (Painting with Floors), supported by work on paper (Splats) characterized by colored splashes.
Furthermore, his video installation will animate during the days of the Todi Festival (30 August-7 September 2025) the Palazzo del Capitano in Piazza del Popolo, the main stage of the event.
“I’m happy – declares Ian Davenport – to have been invited by the Beverly Pepper Projects Foundation and the city of Todi to exhibit my work. For me, Italy has always been the home of artistic brilliance and the painters of the Italian Renaissance have had enormous influence on my work. The inspiration for the colors in my works often comes from artists such as Blessed Angelico, Lorenzo Monaco and Sandro Botticelli. My paintings explore the physical materiality of painting, sometimes going to evolve beyond two -dimensionality, thus assuming a sculptural form that returns a dynamic intervention in the exhibition space“. As usual, the Beverly Pepper Project Foundation will accompany the initiatives dedicated to Ian Davenport with a rich calendar of free collateral events, such as guided visits to the places of the contemporary in Todi, workshops for children and educational-information projects for school groups.
“Ian Davenport – Antonino Ruggiano, mayor of Todi says – gives the Todi Festival 2025 a manifesto full of lights and colors, iconically anticipating the figure of a Special Edition with which the city finds Silvano Spada artistic director and sees
Consolidate the collaboration with the Beverly Pepper Project Foundation. The name of another internationally renowned artist is added to the extraordinary gallery of prestigious signatures, large exhibitions and contemporary works of art that have lived Todi in the last half century “.
“I thank the Beverly Pepper Project Foundation – He asserts Silvano Spada, artistic director Todi Festival – For his tribute to the Festival with the realization of the manifesto signed by the English artist Ian Davenport: a gesture that allows you to continue in my attention to contemporary art with, among others, the names of Alighiero Boetti, Kounellis, Pistoletto, authors of famous posters of some of my festivals. But, above all and with tenderness, I am pleased to remember that, in the now distant 1987, Beverly was my very first fan and my world/cultural reference of my private or representative encounters in the sociality of Todi of the time and, at the time, unknown to me“.
“We are proud – Elisa Veschini, president of Beverly Pepper Project Foundation underlines – To reaffirm our prestigious partnership with the Todi Festival, an alliance that continues to grow with enthusiasm and passion. It is an honor for us to be able to work alongside a festival that, with the new direction of Silvano Spada, is enriched with new energy and visions. His inspiring guide stimulates us to continue an enlightened path that for years has been led to Todi some of the greatest names of contemporary art, making this city a point of reference international for culture. We thank Maestro Ian Davenport for accepting our invitation, his work will contribute once again, to this extraordinary project that celebrates art in all its forms“.
“Ian Davenport – Remember Marco Tonelli, curator of the project and scientific curator of the Beverly Pepper Project Foundation –It is one of the most important British abstract painters active since the late 1980s, recognized internationally, whose works manage to seduce, almost magically, and activate both specialists and profane gaze, thanks to their dynamic colors and the processes of painting always in sight, as if the viewer was part of the work and the work something alive and still in progress. An engaging art therefore, almost participatory, in which the passage of time and the immediacy of the experience seem to constitute the substance of painting, keeping in balance and structure “.
Ian Davenport. Born in Kent, England, in 1966, Ian Davenport graduated from the Goldsmiths College of Art in London in 1988 e
the same year, as part of the generation of Young British Artistsparticipated in the famous exhibition “Freeze“. Already two years after his degree he obtained the first personal exhibition at the Waddington Galleries in London. In 1991 he was appointed for the prestigious Turner Prize for which he still holds the record of the youngest candidate artist. Ian Davenport is known for his abstract paintings that explore the process and materiality. Recently his work has consisted in lines of acrylic paint with care on an area. Escape the painting in the space of the observer where the flows accumulate in complex arrangements of lines and colors. Tate Liverpool in 2000 and Allas Contemporary in Texas in 2018. He made important commissions, including Poured Lines Southwark Street In London in 2006, a 48 -meter wide painting on a bridge, which is one of the greatest permanent public works of art in the United Kingdom. At the 2017 Venice Biennale, Ian Davenport presented an installation of over 1,000 stripes, a Swatch commission, together with a special Swatch art clock in 2016, handed a series of porcelain dishes in collaboration with Meissen, commissioned by the South London Gallery, and designed a special edition bag for the Lady Art project by Christian Dior. In 2010 he completed a residence program at Josef and Annie Albers Foundation in Connecticut, USA. His works are present in important museum collections, including: Arts Council of Great Britain, Tate di London, Center Pompidou of Paris, National Museum Wales of Cardiff, von der Heydt Museum by Wuppertal, Museum of Modern Art of La Spezia, Borusan Art Gallery of Istanbul, Museum of Modern Art in New York and Dallas Museum of Art, Texas. The first monograph of his work was published by Thames Hudson in 2014. Ian Davenport is represented in Italy by the Luca Tommasi Gallery of Milan.
Carlo Franza