Cy Gavin

Cy Gavin’s paintings are metaphorical interpretations of sites that have been shaped over time by human intervention and geological or cosmic phenomena. Composed with fluid, gestural brushstrokes in striking colors, they are at times monumental in scale. Born in Pittsburgh in 1985, Gavin grew up in Donora, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Carnegie Mellon University in 2007 and earned his MFA in 2016 from Columbia University. In 2016 he relocated to New York’s Hudson Valley, where he currently lives and works. In 2015, a few years after the death of his father, Gavin traveled to his ancestral homeland of Bermuda to research his family’s genealogy and the island’s history. The paintings he made during this period depict the historically significant sites of Gibbet Island, Crow Lane, and Tucker’s Town. The latter is the location of an enclave of Black Bermudans that was destroyed in 1920 to develop an exclusive golf resort. These works are marked by the legacies of enslavement, colonialism, and resistance, visualizing the creation and maintenance of similar power structures in the United States. Gavin’s thirty-foot-long painting Bash Bish Falls (2019) is a panoramic view of a clove—or gorge—in southwestern Massachusetts, frozen in winter. The cascade pictured is set in one of the country’s few remaining old-growth eastern hemlock forests and is shown on the night of a total lunar eclipse. Gavin’s first solo museum exhibition, at the Aspen Art Museum, Colorado, in 2021, comprised paintings of natural phenomena including a glacial erratic boulder, transported and deposited by a melting ice sheet during the last ice age; a failing stone dam; Comet NEOWISE; and the pitch-dark recesses of a limestone cavern. Included in the 2022 Whitney Biennial, Gavin’s painting Untitled (Snag) (2022) represents the remains of a partially dead tree located near his studio against a field of bright orange and yellow grasses. The artist’s 2023 debut exhibition at Gagosian, New York, featured depictions of the land outside his studio: meadows he allowed to grow on formerly manicured lawns, saplings planted to rewild the property, and shrubs placed to demarcate its borders. In these paintings, Gavin proposes a conception of nature as it is experienced, and in relation to his status as a citizen, observer, and steward of the land.