Alan Davie is one of Britain's most internationally acclaimed artists and is one of Scotland's most important artist of the twentieth century. He was the first British painter - and perhaps the first of all European artists - to realise the vitality and significance of American Abstract Expressionism. Throughout his life Alan Davie obsessively drew and painted, producing paintings of startling originality, vitality and daring. Combining imagery derived from different world cultures with a love of music and language, Alan Davie's paintings are a complex yet joyous celebration of creativity that combines the expressive freedom of abstraction with a wealth of signs, symbols and words. As early as 1958 Alan Davie emphasised the importance in his work of intuition as expressed in the form of enigmatic signs. During the 1960s, both in paintings and in coloured lithographs, he represented such images with increasing clarity at the expense of gestural handling. Taking on the role of a disinherited shaman, Alan Davie created a synthesis of mythologies from a variety of cultures for a modern civilisation devoid of its own village myths. Alan Davie was elected a Senior Royal Academician in 2012.

Public collections include: National Gallery of Canada, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, The Fleming Collection, London, Tate, London, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, MoMA - Museum of Modern Art, New York City, NY