Noah Davis, a Painterly Dynamo Gone Too Soon, Takes a Seat in Posterity
Educated at the Cooper Union in New York and then based in California, Davis was probably best known as the co-founder, with his wife, the sculptor Karon Davis, of the Underground Museum, an unassuming storefront gallery in Arlington Heights, a Black and Latino part of Los Angeles. Its mission, before folding in 2022, was to bring museum-grade contemporary art, especially Black art, to people who didn't see it very often.
Since his death from cancer at 32 in 2015, the (much deserved) attention on exhibitions of Davis's paintings has grown exponentially, first at the art space he founded, then, in 2020, in a large solo show at the New York location of David Zwirner, the gallery that now represents his estate.
This year the posterity machine revved up with a 60-work museum tour dedicated to Davis. Originating in London, at the Barbican Art Gallery, and Das Minsk in Potsdam, Germany, 'Noah Davis' has now reached the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, accompanied by the full multi-author catalog treatment and vitrines of ephemera. His first museum retrospective, it luxuriates in his smart and expansive situations on canvas, even as it raises questions about how to lead an artist of the millennial generation — with all this cohort's ironies and racial sensitivities — into the annals of American painting.
We begin with folksy pictures of single or dual human figures, in domestic settings or against textural backdrops, painted around 2007 when Davis had his first gallery show in New York. 'Single Mother With Father Out of the Picture' shows a woman relaxing in an armchair, maybe in a living room. Posing quizzically between her legs is a shirtless child, the painting's ghostly focal point. The girl has been rendered in various tones of brown, then stripped with turpentine or some other chemical, then painted again, etc., until she appears burnished in three dimensions through the palimpsests of oil, with certain cleanly defined details — eyes, nose, mouth, nipple — floating over top.
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