Ian Davenport was born in Sidcup, Kent, United Kingdom 1966, and has for over 20 years made paintings by pouring paint onto a tilted surface, known as his colorful “puddle” paintings. To make them, the artist meticulously pours hundreds of thin acrylic lines down a canvas, and they artfully pool and swerve at the bottom. Driven by an enduring fascination with the materiality of paint, he goes to work using his signature technique, which delivers elegant vertical lines cascading down the panels into rich puddles of color. Davenport’s control is evident in the carefully composed series of colors that populate his paintings, which are experiments in color relationships guided by his intuition and mastery of the subject. Davenport often uses the colors in the historical work as a reference point to initiate his own color sequences and explorations of movement, surface and light. In so doing, he questions how color gives shape to a picture, helping to structure the background and foreground in representational pictures, and produce rhythm and dynamism in abstract art.

Ian Davenport studied at Goldsmiths' College of Art in London and graduated in 1988, the same year he featured in the “Freeze” exhibition curated by fellow Young British Artist Damien Hirst. He was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1991.

Davenports work is included in many public collections such as the Arts Council Collection, London; British Council Collection, London; Tate, London; The British Museum, London; National Museum of Wales, Cardiff; FNAC Fonds National d’art contemporain, France; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museu Berardo, Portugal; Von Der Heydt Museum, Wuppertal, Germany; Museum Voorlinden, The Netherlands; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Rose Museum, Massachusetts; Dallas Museum of Art, Texas. His monumental painting Giardini Colourfall, a single painting spanning 45 feet, was featured within the Giardini of the 57th Venice Biennale, 2017.

He currently lives and works in London, United Kingdom.