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Alan Davie was one of the most admired and original British artists of the 1960s. He began visiting New York in the late 1950s and met and befriended such artists as Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock. "It was American artists who were the first to really appreciate what I was doing," Davie reflected in 2000. Like many of these artists, he developed an improvisatory process, in which multiple canvases were laid out on his studio floor and worked up simultaneously. Davie’s interests were wide, incorporating African and Pacific art, Zen Buddhism, and poetry and jazz (of which he was a talented practitioner). These interests are reflected in his busy, colorful canvases, which combine elements of figuration with passages of bold abstraction. Gallery label for installation of YCBA collection, 2020