The New York Times, review by Walker Mimms
2025
The painter Noah Davis specialized in magical misrecognition. He made large canvases of average human scenery in semi-surreal compositions and in dusky, low contrasts that lead you into a tremendous harmony with the world you know while sounding off-notes from a world you do not.
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.
