via Wikipedia: After graduating from Carnegie Mellon, Gavin moved to San Francisco and worked in post-production for several years before relocating to New York in 2010. In New York, Gavin worked as Associate Producer for avant-garde opera company, Beth Morrison Projects, as Web Content Manager for non-profit gallery PARTICIPANT INC, and served as archivist for Vito Acconci.[7] Fugue States, Overture, At Heaven's Command, and Rubell Foundation Residency Gavin's first solo exhibition, Fugue States, opened at Revision Space (Cindy Lisica Gallery) in February 2014, followed by his debut New York solo exhibition, titled Overture, at Sargent's Daughters in July 2015.[1] Twelve mixed-media paintings were shown. The works explored the artist's childhood, specifically his relationship with his father, as well as the "double consciousness" of black life in America. Gavin often paints his abstracted figures using a unique combination of paints that render the subject in "ultra-black" and contrasts the figure's austerity with bright, saturated colors for the landscapes and backgrounds.[1] The show opened to positive reviews from critics. Martha Schwendener from The New York Times wrote that Gavin makes, "the backgrounds of his paintings as attention-grabbing as the figures. Craggy and sculpted, they conjure the terrain of the islands, but also canvases by Francis Bacon, Gauguin and Cézanne, whose landscapes look as if they were chiseled onto the canvas."[8]Gavin's third solo exhibition, titled At Heaven's Command, opened at Sargent's Daughters in April 2016.[1] The show included more of Gavin's hybrid paintings as well as new video works. Gavin spent the previous year in Bermuda and used his time on the island to research his paternal genealogy and the complicated history of the Slave Trade on the island.[9] The title for the exhibition was taken from the first line of the British anthem "Rule, Britannia," which was written during Bermuda's slave period.[10]Later in 2016, Gavin was included in the group exhibition High Anxiety at the Rubell Family Collection in Miami, Florida.[11] Gavin also held a six-month residency at the Rubell Foundation during this time.[12] In 2017, Gavin moved his studio from New York City to upstate New York.[13] Gavin's third solo exhibition, Devils Isle, opened in early 2018 in Paris, France at VNH Gallery.[14] On March 3, 2019, Gavin Brown's enterprise opened an exhibition of paintings by Cy Gavin. It was the artist's first show with the gallery and was met with favorable reviews. Poet and critic Shiv Kotecha wrote for Frieze Magazine, " Gavin has painted a suite of five rapturous landscapes that channel the cries of condemned and enslaved bodies under the domicile of empire. Like Gavin’s earlier works, which depict the black body in motion, these are ‘portraits’ of landscape, which is to say that they don't depict their pastoral subjects – a thrashing waterfall, a brimming surf, a dark grotto – as much as they enact the scene of recognition on which portraiture is usually predicated."[15] On April 6, 2022, Cy Gavin has his work ‘untitled’ shown in the 2022 Whitney Biennial ‘ Quiet as it’s kept’ alongside sixty-three other artists at the Whitney Museum of American Art. The work is a painting that Gavin made during a lockdown.[16]In 2023, Gavin gained representation with Gagosian Gallery, and he has since exhibited with the galleries in New York (2023), Beverly Hills (2024), Rome (2024), and Hong Kong (2025). Gavin's blue carpet was "front and center" at the Met Gala in 2025. About the Artist (via Gagosian):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.