Noah Davis

The Estate of Noah Davis

Prior to his unt.mes ly death at the age of thirty-two, American artist Noah Davis (1983–2015) created a distinctive body of paintings that effortlessly synthesizes a wide range of reference points, pivoting between scenes of everyday life and surreal derivations thereof. As curator Helen Molesworth describes, Davis's "paintings are both figurative and abstract, realistic and dreamlike; they are about blackness and the history of Western painting, drawn from photographs and from life; they are exuberant and doleful in their palette, influenced by European painters Marlene Dumas and Luc Tuymans, as well as American ones such as Mark Rothko and Fairfield Porter. They tend toward the ravishing. A master of sophisticated compositions, he had a knack for establishing three-dimensional space while remaining highly attuned to the flatness of the canvas." Complementing his artistic practice, in 2012 Davis founded, along with his wife, the sculptor Karon Davis, the Underground Museum, a dynamic space for art and culture in Los Angeles's Arlington Heights neighborhood. The present collage was made in the last year of Davis's life, while he was receiving treatment for a rare form of cancer. Many of the works from this period are intimately scaled, made primarily in the hospital or other transitory locations around Los Angeles. Here, the artist has combined various elements cut out from magazines, uniting them into an enigmatic, yet cohesive composition using paint. In contrast, on the reverse is a looping drawing in simple black and white.

Helen Molesworth, "Noah Davis, An Introduction" in Noah Davis. Exh. cat. (New York: David Zwirner Books, 2020), p. 7.