TM Davy paints luminous, intimate worlds where figures glow with presence, moving through layers of perception and imagination. Blending careful realism with archetypal symbolism, his work explores love as a sphere of magic and protection, defiant against time and illuminated by connection.

During his residency at Victoria House Residency, Davy is continuing a body of work inspired by the cliffs and caves of this coastline, landscapes where history and legend blur. This process of observation and discovery is still unfolding as storied motifs begin to take shape in paint. Defiant candles flicker against crashing waves, mystic horses rise from the tide, and firelit caves glow with presence. Here, fantasy is not fixed but shifting, a way of feeling through the moment, where painting opens a passage between perception, memory, and change.

On April 26, 2025, Davy’s residency will culminate in a conjoined opening at Victoria House and Carl Freedman Gallery. Tine Mara, meaning “flame of the sea” in Irish, gives name to this evolving body of work, where fire and water, material and imagined, converge. Across these paintings, light endures at the edge of vastness, holding space for memory and transcendence.

Davy’s work builds on over a decade of exhibitions that explore light as both a phenomenon and a metaphor, where painting becomes a threshold to relationships, mystery, and inner worlds. Fae at Company Gallery in New York in 2023 journeyed into caves where queer magic burns beneath a changing world. This Marram at Van Doren Waxter in New York in 2019 traced the body’s connection to landscape, dissolving boundaries between self and environment. Candela at Eleven Rivington in New York in 2013 centred on firelight as a vessel for intimacy and awareness. His work has also appeared in group exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum, MASS MoCA, and KW Institute for Contemporary Art, with collaborations at the Whitney Museum, MoMA, the New Museum, and Tate Modern.

Through painting, Davy seeks what endures, where light resists the dark, love defies time, and the unseen takes form. He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.