ART CITIES: N.York-Noah Davis

Based primarily in Los Angeles, Noah Davis created a body of figurative paintings that explore a range of Black life. Davis knew that he had a responsibility to represent the people who surrounded him. He drew on anonymous photography found in flea markets, personal archives, film and television, music, literature, art history and his imagination to create a ravishing body of work. Often enigmatic, sometimes uncanny, Davis’ paintings reveal a deep feeling for people, humanity and the existential and universal layers of everyday life.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: David Zwirner Gallery Archive

The exhibition ”Ancient Reign” is the first exhibition to focus on works on paper  by Noah Davis, a significant and generative area of his practice, this intimate grouping of works provides insight into the wide-ranging interests, influences, and ideas that equally informed his paintings and curatorial activities. On view are several collages loosely inspired by the Egyptian myth of Isis and Osiris; a group of abstract drawings and collages that, in Davis’s typical fashion, play with the idea of referentiality; and a rarely seen artist’s book outlining his vision for the Purple Garden at the Underground Museum, the experimental Los Angeles exhibition space that he and Karon founded together. The presentation is complemented by a small selection of paintings that further elucidate the back-and-forth between media inherent to Davis’s body of work. Noah Davis (3/6/1983 – 26/8/2015) was a figurative painter and co-founder of The Underground Museum in Los Angeles. Despite his exceedingly premature death at the age of 32, Davis’s paintings are a crucial part of the story of the rise of figurative and representational painting in the first two decades of the 21st century. Loneliness and tenderness suffuse his rigorously composed paintings as do traces of his abiding interest in artists such as Marlene Dumas, Kerry James Marshall, Fairfield Porter, and Luc Tuymans. The pictures can be slightly deceptive, as they are modest in scale while being emotionally ambitious. Using a notably dry paint application, and a moody palette of blues, purples, and greens, his work falls into two loose categories: there are scenes from everyday life, such as a portrait of his young son, a soldier returning from war, or a housing project designed by famed modernist architect Paul Williams. And there are paintings that traffic in magical realism, surreal images that depict the world both seen and unseen, where the presence of ancestors, ghosts, and fantasy are everywhere apparent. Generous, curious, and energetic, Davis was also the founder, along with his wife, the sculptor Karon Davis, of The Underground Museum, an artist and family-run space for art and culture in Los Angeles. The Underground Museum began exceedingly modestly—Noah and Karon worked to join a series of 3 storefronts in the Arlington Heights neighborhood of LA. Davis’s dream was to exhibit “museum-quality” art in a working-class black and Latino neighborhood. In the early days of the Underground Museum Davis was unable to secure museum loans, so he organized exhibitions of his work, alongside that of his friends and family, and word of mouth spread about Davis’s unique curatorial gestures. In 2014 the Underground Museum entered into a partnership with the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles and Davis began organizing exhibitions using MOCA’s collection as his starting point. In the aftermath of Davis’s passing the team of family and friends he gathered continued his work, transforming it into one of the most important gathering places in Los Angeles for artists, filmmakers, musicians, writers, and activists. The museum was closed for nearly two years due to the COVID-19 lockdowns and reopened in January 2022 under the newly appointed co-directorship of curator Meg Onli and executive Cristina Pacheco. The final exhibition in the Underground Museum was a solo retrospective of Davis’s paintings. The museum closed in March 2022 under unclear circumstances with the departures of the directors. In a letter to supporters of the museum, posted to social media and the museum’s website, Karon Davis wrote that she and her family had been “not able to fully grieve [Noah’s] loss privately,” and noted “how hard it has been for our family to let go enough to allow Meg and Cristina to do their jobs.” The museum has not announced any long-term plans to reopen.

Photo: Noah Davis, Untitled, 2014, Courtesy David Zwirner Gallery

Info: Curator: Karon Davis, David Zwirner Gallery, 34 East 69th Street, New York, ΝΥ, USA, Duration: 13/11/2024-25/1/2025, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.davidzwirner.com/