Exceptional Works: Noah Davis

“The first time I saw Noah’s work, I was immediately captured by the world that he was imagining in the work. It was both an imagining of a world that didn't exist, and very much documenting a world that he existed in, in the past and the present, and it seemed in many ways to be incredibly timeless.”

—Thelma Golden

Noah Davis painting Graduation, 2015, in a still from Untitled, In Progress. A Documentary of Noah Davis, 2016, directed by Nicole Otero, produced by Kahlil Joseph. Collection of The Underground Museum. Courtesy the 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. 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 work, Graduation (2015), is featured on the occasion of the gallery’s presentation at Art Basel, 2023.

Noah Davis

Graduation, 2015

Oil on canvas

63 5/8 x 63 5/8 inches (161.6 x 161.6 cm)

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One of the last paintings made by the artist during his lifetime, Graduation is based on a found photograph—a common source for Davis’s paintings. The painting depicts a young Black man who wears a tan suit with a white shirt and tie, his hands joined at his waist to hold an object, perhaps a diploma. As is typical of Davis’s figurative works, the subject’s face recedes into abstraction, underscoring the artist’s longstanding interest in body language as a powerful means of expression.

Karon Davis discussing Noah Davis’s painting Graduation, 2015

The young man stands in a patch of verdant grass, bordered by a hedge of tall green bushes that flank the peach-colored facade of a stucco or limestone building behind him. Two additional figures are visible on the far right edge of the picture, their backs to the subject as they appear to walk away from the building. The man’s formal attire and solitary stance together resemble a typical graduation portrait, one likely captured by a family member or friend on the monumental occasion associated with accomplishment and burgeoning adulthood. This painting embodies an enigmatic, evocative quality of potential, as the young suited subject stands and faces his observers and the world before him.

Left: Luc Tuymans, Solitude, 1990. © Luc Tuymans. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner; Right: Marlene Dumas, Schaammeisje (Shy Girl), 1991. © Marlene Dumas. Tuymans and Dumas are often named as influences for Davis’s work.

“[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.… They tend toward the ravishing.”

—Helen Molesworth, Noah Davis

Noah Davis painting Graduation, 2015, a still from Untitled, In Progress. A Documentary of Noah Davis, 2016, directed by Nicole Otero, produced by Kahlil Joseph. Collection of The Underground Museum. Courtesy the artist

“The references are to things that are approachable and familiar, but the inferences are frequently quite mysterious. The images and figures are often familiar but unattainable, akin to futile attempts to recall a dream after waking.”

—Maikoiyo Alley-Barnes, Young Blood: Noah Davis, Kahlil Joseph, The Underground Museum

Installation view, 59th Venice Biennale: The Milk of Dreams, 2022

Installation view, Noah Davis, The Underground Museum, Los Angeles, 2022

Installation view, 59th Venice Biennale: The Milk of Dreams, 2022

Throughout his oeuvre, Davis was committed to the depiction of Black figures in unremarkable, everyday situations, pursuing this subject matter at a time when figurative painting was largely out of favor (and ultimately playing a significant role in its resurgence). As he described, “Race plays a role in as far as my figures are Black. The paintings aren't political at all though. If I'm making any statement, it's to just show Black people in normal scenarios, where drugs and guns are nothing to do with it. You rarely see Black people represented independent of the civil rights issues or social problems that go on.”

Noah Davis painting Graduation, 2015, a still from Untitled, In Progress. A Documentary of Noah Davis, 2016, directed by Nicole Otero, produced by Kahlil Joseph. Collection of The Underground Museum. Courtesy the artist

“My paintings just have a very personal relationship with the figures in them. They’re about the people around me. I want people to read them like this whilst taking a meaning of their own from each work.”

—Noah Davis

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