Noah Davis

A survey of the late American painter honours his singular, otherworldly vision

Noah Davis, installation view, Barbican Art Gallery 2025. © Jemima Yong, Barbican Art Gallery.

Barbican Art Gallery, London
6 February – 11 May 2025

by JOE LLOYD

In December 2011, Noah Davis’s father, Keven, died of cancer. The American artist was left an inheritance with the instruction to “foster community and joy”. Davis and his wife, fellow artist Karon, decided to open a free-for-all art space in a place where art was rarely seen. They converted four shopfronts in Los Angeles’ Arlington Heights neighbourhood into the Underground Museum. No institutions would loan art for their opening exhibition. Undeterred, Noah created his own. Striplights were repurposed as an imitation of Dan Flavin, while a $70 vacuum cleaner from Craigslist became a Jeff Koons. Davis found a Duchamp-like bottle rack and fabricated a mock Robert Smithson out of mirrors and sand. The show was pointedly called Imitation of Wealth:a reference to Douglas Sirk’s 1959 film Imitation of Lifein which a Black heroine poses as white, as well as a dig at the contemporary art world.

This wry display might position Davis as an artist obsessed with the business of art, an art-world ironist, but this could not be further from the truth. Davis was a serious painter, who over eight years developed a distinctive style that applied a magical realist lens to contemporary Black American life. He died in 2015, aged 32, at the peak of his success. The Barbican’s new retrospective offers a breakneck tour through his work, with judicious selections from all his main series. Satisfyingly, it offers a portrait of a painter always on the move, expanding his technique and developing his style. Even when a painting does not quite work, one can understand why Davis did it, and see where his experimentation took him.

Noah Davis, Single Mother with Father out of the Picture, 2007-08. © The Estate of Noah Davis. Courtesy The Estate of Noah Davis and David Zwirner. Photo: Kerry McFate.

The earliest work here shows Davis finding his groove. Some, such as the brilliantly named Single Mother With Father Out of the Picture (2007-08) and Bad Boy for Life (2007) appear to depict scenes from everyday life. Yet there is always something off, something not quite of this world, whether it is the floral armchair in the former or the slime-green lamp-holder in the latter. From the start, Davis aimed for a timelessness. The protagonist of Mary Jane (2008) is dressed in what might be a historic maid’s outfit, but also wears athletic high socks and Birkenstock-like clogs. She appears to stand before a bush, but the impossible black space beneath this green miasma suggests she might exist in an entirely decorative realm. Early on, Davis also delved into Black history. His 40 Acres and a Unicorn (2007), named in reference to Abraham Lincoln’s unfulfilled promise to give formerly enslaved families land and mules, is a striking blurring of historical reality and fantasy. The unicorn seems as if it might melt into ooze. In a sign of Davis’s youth, its neck is positioned incorrectly.

Noah Davis, Mary Jane, 2008. © The Estate of Noah Davis. Courtesy The Estate of Noah Davis and David Zwirner. Photo: Kerry McFate.

With these works, Davis announced himself as an artist with a distinctive perspective. Yet he was already worried that he would become pigeonholed: “Do I have to make it new, and about hip-hop and all this shit to get people interested? Or maybe there is something else?” A 2008 trip into abstract painting timed for Barack Obama’s election was one of his few missteps. Reacting to the proliferation of Obama’s image in the campaign, Davis wanted to get away from depicting Black male bodies. Only one of these three abstracts was sold, to a friend, after the exhibition; the others were painted over.

Yet this notion of moving away from representing individualised people informed the rest of Davis’s career. For his first solo exhibition in New York in 2009, Davis cast himself and Karon as the Ancient Egyptian deities Osiris and Iris; a painting of the latter has the goddess stand in front of a humdrum plank wall. The Architect (2009) sees the celebrated African American architect Paul Revere Williams examine a model of a hi-tech glass pyramid; Davis congeals Williams’s face with a goopy dollop of white paint, in an attempt to obscure the individual. It makes for a rather messy composition. 

Noah Davis, Isis, 2009. Mellon Foundation Art Collection. © The Estate of Noah Davis. Courtesy The Estate of Noah Davis and David Zwirner. Photo: Kerry McFate.

Davis would soon find a better way to enact this process, by blurring the faces of his figures so that their features become generalised rather than specific. The people in the Savage Wilds (1988) series, taken from paused scenes from controversial talkshows such as Maury and Jerry Springer, are both mask-like and Munch-like. Davis scoured the flea markets of Los Angeles in search of old photos of Black Americans, gathering his photos online and creating a repository of images of people anonymised by the internet. For all the analogue pleasures of Davis’s work, it also bears the hallmarks of the digital age, where the lives of strangers become visible.

Noah Davis, Painting for My Dad, 2011. Rubell Museum. © The Estate of Noah Davis
. Courtesy The Estate of Noah Davis and David Zwirner. Photo: Kerry McFate.

Another way to remove the individual is to paint from behind: the colossal Painting for My Dad (2011) shows a man standing on the threshold of another existence. He wears a contemporary dress – though the trousers have an El Greco sheen – but holds an archaic gas lamp as he peers into what could otherwise be a plunge into nothingness or a disappearance into a black cloud. It is a stirring tribute to Davis’s father, while avoiding the conventions of portraiture. This work also sees Davis begin to use diaphanous washes of paint, almost translucent. His palette began to become gloomier: even his brightest scenes seem to exist under a storm cloud.

The bright magical realism of his earliest work is gradually replaced by a free-flowing dreaminess. In The Missing Link series (2013), he places a man with an anachronistic bowler hat into Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe and a Tati-esque cityscape with buildings painted with Rothko-like strips of colour. The first painting in the series sees a boy appear to levitate. Davis blurs this picture so it looks like footage from a Super 8 camera, suffused with nostalgia for an event that never happened.

Noah Davis, 1975 (8), 2013. © The Estate of Noah Davis. Courtesy The Estate of Noah Davis and David Zwirner. Photo: Kerry McFate.

Davis was now at the peak of his powers. He returned to reality with 1975 (2013), a series of paintings based on photographs his mother took in high school. They depict Black Americans in swimming pools, classrooms and playgrounds, scenes of social liveliness. That December, exactly two years after his father died, Davis was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer. He kept working throughout chemotherapy. The Pueblo del Rio series (2014) reimagines a dilapidated garden city as a place of utopian harmony. There is music in the air: a conductor wields his baton, a musician blows his horn and serried ballet dancers perform arabesques on lush green lawns under a purple-grey sky. It is a lush fantasy, but Davis does not try to disguise the prison-like fences and repetitive structures of the estate. The Congo paintings (2014), though based on the photographs of Davis’s brother, Kahlil Joseph, have a similar sense of reverie. Congo #2, a series of men bunched together beneath pylons, is so gossamer it could be blown away.

These masterful late series show Davis in complete command of his suggestive, sombre idiom. His cancer treatment was unsuccessful, and Davis died in August 2015. Three final untitled paintings from the month before show him confronting his fate. One is of a funeral, another of two girls sleeping together in a gesture of peaceful repose. The third, taken from a photo Davis asked Karon to take, sees a solitary man in a self-storage warehouse. He is painted so thinly he seems to be vanishing. Davis’s enchanting work deserves to remain with us.