Noah Davis at the Barbican
Noah Davis at the Barbican – A Dreamlike Chronicle of Black Life
Noah Davis (1983–2015) was a visionary painter whose work captured the quiet, everyday moments of Black life with haunting beauty and profound emotion. A decade after his passing, the Barbican’s retrospective of his work cements his status as one of contemporary art’s great losses and lasting influences.
Davis was not just a painter but a cultural pioneer. In Los Angeles, he founded the Underground Museum, a space dedicated to making high art accessible to Black working-class communities. This commitment to reshaping the art world is subtly referenced in the exhibition, which includes the “Jeff Koons” vacuum cleaner Davis found on Craigslist and a borrowed William Kentridge film, nodding to his creative resourcefulness.
His paintings are both timeless and fleeting, depicting figures that seem caught between the past and present. A man walks alone across a landscape that echoes both Edinburgh Castle and California, dwarfed by towering forms. A rifle-wielding figure sits in dense foliage, evoking Manet, while a swimming pool scene—at first playful—slowly reveals the harsh reality of segregation. The figures, carefree yet historically burdened, drift through water rendered in luminous blues, somewhere between Monet and Diebenkorn.
Davis’s influences are vast, from Matisse to Rothko, but his work is uniquely his own. His use of oil paint—washed, blurred, and sometimes dripping like fine rain—adds to the dreamlike quality of his canvases. In The Architect, a tribute to Black architect Paul Revere Williams, Davis obscures the subject’s face behind a veil of white paint, both a bold political statement and an act of gentle abstraction.
What sets Davis apart is the raw sincerity in his work. He paints with deep affection for his subjects, whether they are anonymous figures drawn from old photographs or members of his own family. His wife, Karon, appears in one painting, standing against their home’s peeling stucco walls, golden fans outstretched like wings. In another, she is a child, her face hidden behind a Holly Hobbie doll’s white mask—a striking reflection on identity and history.
In The Missing Link 4, Davis places Black bathers beneath a looming office block, hinting at the work of Mark Bradford and the tensions of urban life. His presence in the West Coast art scene was undeniable—by 2008, he was exhibiting alongside major Black artists like David Hammons and Kara Walker. Yet his work, despite its sophistication, never loses its emotional core.
One of his most poignant paintings portrays his father standing on the edge of a precipice, holding a lantern before a vast, star-filled sky. Painted from behind, the figure stares into the darkness—a quiet meditation on mortality. Davis, though not yet able to follow, sees and captures it with empathy.
Spanning just eight years, this retrospective is a testament to an artist who was only beginning to realize his full potential. Some early works, like 40 Acres and a Unicorn, play with satire, but his later paintings transcend politics, approaching something archetypal. His Pueblo del Rio series reimagines a crumbling 1940s housing project, filling it with beauty—ballet dancers in white tutus, a man reading by twilight, a boy playing the Last Post beneath a mauve sky.
Davis’s work lingers in the mind, like the fading figures he so often painted—both present and vanishing, held in time by the delicate power of his brush. This retrospective, spacious and deeply moving, ensures that his legacy will not disappear.
