Press room

Barbican Art Gallery is pleased to announce new exhibitions for early 2025, including the first international retrospective of Noah Davis and a new Curve commission from Citra Sasmita. 

Noah Davis 
Barbican Art Gallery 
6 February – 11 May 2025 

Citra Sasmita: Into Eternal Land
The Curve
30 January – 20 April 2025

Please see more details below – the full release is available to view and download in PDF format from the sidebar. 

Noah Davis 
Barbican Art Gallery 
6 February – 11 May 2025 

“Painting does something to your soul that nothing else can. It’s visceral and immediate”
Noah Davis, Dazed, Feb 2010

In February 2025, Barbican Art Gallery will host the largest institutional survey to date of the work of late American artist Noah Davis (1983 – 2015). Bringing together over 50 works spanning the artist’s career, this major touring exhibition offers a comprehensive overview of Davis’ extraordinary practice in painting as well as his work in curating and community-building as co-founder of The Underground Museum. 
 
Based primarily in Los Angeles, Davis created a body of figurative paintings that explore a range of Black life. Believing he had a “responsibility to represent the people around me,” Davis drew on anonymous photography found in flea markets, personal archives, film and television, music, literature, art history and his imagination to create a ravishing body of work.  Figures dive into swimming pools, sleep, dance, and look at public art in settings that can be both realistic and dreamlike, joyful, and melancholic. Often enigmatic and uncanny, Davis’ paintings reveal a deep feeling for people, humanity, and the emotional textures of everyday life. 

Motivated by the desire to “change the way people view art, the way they buy art, the way they make art,” Davis and his wife Karon co-founded The Underground Museum in 2012, a revered and loved institution in the historically Black and Latinx neighborhood of Arlington Heights, Los Angeles.

Organised chronologically, this retrospective presents Davis’ relentless curiosity beginning with his first exhibition in 2007, spanning 8 years until his untimely death in 2015. Featuring previously unseen paintings, works on paper, sculpture and his work at The Underground Museum, the exhibition pays special attention to the art historical, philosophical and conceptual approaches to his practice, revealing that collected images, humour, and above all, people were the core of his work. 
 
Noah Davis is initiated by Barbican, London and DAS MINSK, Potsdam where it will be on display 7 September 2024 – 5 January 2025. The exhibition will tour to the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles 8 June – 31 August 2025.

Citra Sasmita: Into Eternal Land
The Curve 
30 January – 20 April 2025

In January 2025, Indonesian artist Citra Sasmita will transform The Curve for her first solo exhibition in the UK. Working fluidly across the mediums of painting, sculptural installation, embroidery and scent, Sasmita will invite visitors on a symbolic, multi-sensory journey through the 90-metre-long gallery, exploring ideas of ancestral memory, ritual and migration. 

Sasmita’s practice often engages with the Indonesian Kamasan painting technique. Dating from the fifteenth century, and traditionally practiced exclusively by men, Kamasan was used to narrate Hindu epics. Reclaiming this masculine practice, Sasmita is interested in dismantling misconceptions of Balinese culture and confronting its violent colonial past. Challenging gender hierarchies and reinventing mythologies, her protagonists are powerful women who populate a post-patriarchal world. 

Citra Sasmita (b. 1990, Bali, Indonesia) is a self-taught artist; she studied literature and physics, then worked as a short story illustrator for the Bali Post before she began developing her expanded artistic practice. Major group exhibitions include the forthcoming Toronto Biennial of Art (Canada, 2024); After Rain, Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale (Saudi Arabia, 2024); Ten Thousand Suns, 24th Biennale of Sydney (Australia, 2024); Choreographies of the Impossible, 35th São Paulo Biennale (Brazil, 2023); The Open World, 3rd Thailand Biennale, Mae Fah Luang Art and Cultural Park, Chiang Rai (Thailand, 2023); Garden of Ten Seasons, Savvy Contemporary, Berlin (Germany, 2022); Kathmandu Triennale (Nepal, 2021-2022); ARTJOG MMXXII, Time To Wonder, Jogja National Museum, Yogyakarta (Indonesia, 2021); and the Biennale Yogyakarta (Indonesia, 2019). Solo shows include Atlas of Curiosity, Yeo Workshop (Singapore, 2023); Ode To The Sun, Yeo Workshop (Singapore, 2020); Tales of Nowhere, Museum MACAN, Jakarta (Indonesia, 2020); and Under The Skin, Redbase Foundation, Yogyakarta (Indonesia, 2018).

Shanay Jhaveri, Head of Visual Arts at the Barbican, said: “We are delighted to share the first of our Visual Arts programme for 2025. From Noah Davis’s original and uncanny paintings in the Art Gallery to Citra Sasmita’s vibrant, multi-sensory installations in The Curve, these two exhibitions shine a light on artists who invoke the magical and the mythological to challenge hierarchies and reimagine the world around them.” 

Visual Arts programme across the Barbican in 2024:  

• Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art 
  Barbican Art Gallery 
  Until 26 May 2024
   
• Soufiane Ababri: Their mouths were full of bumblebees but it was me who was pollinated
  The Curve
  Until 30 June 2024
   
• Ibrahim Mahama: Purple Hibiscus 
  Barbican Lakeside 
  Until 18 August 2024 
   
• Francis Alÿs: Ricochets
  Barbican Art Gallery 
  27 June – 1 September 2024
   
• Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum 
  The Curve
  18 September 2024 – 5 January 2025
   
• The Imaginary Institution of India: Art 1975-1998
  Barbican Art Gallery
  5 October 2024 – 5 January 2025
   

Please download the full release for more information, including highlights from across the wider Barbican programme for 2024.