Exceptional Works: Noah Davis

Presented on the occasion of Art Basel 2025, The Goat from Grayson (2008) dates from a pivotal time in Noah Davis’s life. Emblematic of his compositions from this period, the painting blends real and surreal elements to create an enigmatic tableau that is suffused with a latent sense of narrative.

Prior to his untimely death at the age of thirty-two, 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 the curator Helen Molesworth has observed, “Davis’s paintings are often structured by a tension between the quotidian and the magical, the literally pedestrian and the supernatural.”

Employing a skewed perspective in which the viewer seems to look up at the scene from below—a framing device commonly used in film—the composition of The Goat from Grayson is grounded by a massive, leafless tree trunk, positioned just off-center. The tree's branches extend outward, sectioning off the canvas while sky and foliage seem to intermingle around them, reinforcing a collapsed sense of time and space. In the foreground, two figures—one of whom is dressed as a referee—work to free an indeterminate, abstracted animal splayed out before them while another man, naked from the waist up, looks down on them from the upper reaches of the tree.