Press room

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

From 6 February 2025, the Barbican will host the UK’s first institutional survey of the late American artist Noah Davis (1983 – 2015), bringing together over 50 works spanning painting, sculpture and works on paper. This major exhibition, accompanied by a rich, multidisciplinary programme of events, charts the breadth of Davis’s relentless creativity from 2007 to his untimely death in 2015. It offers a comprehensive overview of his practice in painting, curating and community-building as co-founder of the Underground Museum, Los Angeles.

Davis created a body of figurative paintings that explores the emotional, and fantastical, textures of everyday life. Based primarily in Los Angeles, he believed he had a “responsibility to represent the people around me” and drew on an expansive pool of references – anonymous vintage photography found in flea markets, personal archives, film and television, music, literature, art history and his imagination – to paint a cast of characters, some real, some fictional, that dive into swimming pools, sleep, dance and look at public art. Davis agilely moved between painting styles, often using unorthodox techniques and a diverse palette to create scenes that feel both realistic and dreamlike, joyful and melancholic. 

Davis understood the power of art to uplift others and believed art was for everyone. In 2012, he and Karon Davis, his wife and fellow artist, co-founded the Underground Museum, a revered and much-loved institution in the historically Black and Latinx neighborhood of Arlington Heights, Los Angeles. They converted four storefronts into a cultural centre that was free and open to all, transforming the car park into a garden planted with purple flowers in homage to Prince. In his lifetime, Davis used the Underground Museum as a studio, a site for residencies and an exhibition space, convincing the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA) to lend their collection in a three-year partnership starting in 2014. By the time he died in 2015, he had planned 18 exhibitions for the Underground Museum using MOCA’s collection, motivated by the desire to “change the way people view art, the way they buy art, the way they make art.” 

Organised chronologically and featuring loans from both public and private international collections, the exhibition features groups of paintings made between 2007 and 2015 that chart his interest in politics and current affairs, everyday life, ancient Egypt, family history, the racism of the American media, art history and architecture. The paintings will be positioned alongside Davis’s experimentations in sculpture, installation, works on paper and curation, giving special attention to the conceptual underpinnings of his practice, as well as his engagement with the complex histories of representation and image-making. The exhibition will also include a selection of Davis’s eclectic source material, on display for the first time. 

This gallery show will be accompanied by a cross-arts series of events at the Barbican, inspired by Davis’s spirit of creative togetherness and his vision for the Underground Museum. Activating multiple locations across the Centre, this multidisciplinary programme will comprise a series of talks – including from writer and podcaster Helen Molesworth – as well as musical performances, workshops, exhibition tours, cinema screenings and wellness activities. The full programme will be announced soon. 

Shanay Jhaveri, Head of Visual Arts at the Barbican, said: “We are delighted to be bringing the work of Noah Davis to audiences here in the UK. A most original and uncanny painter to have emerged in recent years, Davis’s distinctive vision captures the nuances of life with poignancy and depth, bridging personal and collective narratives in ways that profoundly connect with our times. This exhibition is an opportunity not only to celebrate his extraordinary legacy but to inspire dialogues around representation, identity, and community.”

Highlights of the exhibition include:  
 

• 40 Acres and a Unicorn, 2007 – a painting of a young man riding a unicorn which emerges from a black background to blend the fantastical with the political. The work's title references the unrealised decree that formerly enslaved families freed during the American Civil War would be given ‘40 acres and a mule’. 
   
• Nobody, 2008 – the sole survivor of a series of three abstract paintings – the only abstract works Davis produced – depicting the shape of Nevada, a swing state in the 2004 US presidential election. Rendered in deep purple with glitter applied to the surface, the work blends republican red and democrat blue to consider how abstraction – rather than figuration – might be political.
   
• Isis, 2009 – exhibited at his first solo show in 2009, this painting is inspired by ancient Egypt and portrays Davis’s wife Karon as the titular Egyptian goddess of magic, standing in front of a white clapboard house. Davis often drew on source material from different time periods to blend historical and contemporary imagery.
   
• Savage Wilds, 2012 – a series of paintings shown for the first time since 2012 in which Davis cast his gaze on the white talk-show hosts of daytime television, notably their often racist and misogynistic portrayals of Black subjects for the sake of entertainment.
   
• 1975, 2013 – painted directly from photographs taken by Davis’s mother in 1975. This series of mostly anonymous bodies in landscapes and urban settings demonstrates the artist’s commitment to showing people in what he described as “normal scenarios”.
   
• Imitation of Wealth, 2013 – a partial re-staging within the Barbican Art Gallery of the first exhibition Davis curated and opened at the Underground Museum in 2013, in which the artist created ‘imitations’ of sculptures by Dan Flavin, Jeff Koons, Marcel Duchamp and Robert Smithson.
   
• Seventy Works, 2014 – a selection of painted collages which combine images of friends, anonymous figures cut out from magazines, modernist sculptures and newspaper clippings.
   
• Pueblo del Rio, 2014 – a series of paintings that reimagines one of the oldest, largest and most impoverished public housing developments in Los Angeles as a site for music, song and dance.
   
• Untitled, 2015 – one of Davis’s final paintings showing two girls lying on a sofa within a living room, a Rothko painting behind them.
   
• Journey to the Moon (2003), 2015 – staged at the Underground Museum, Journey to the Moon – a solo show of the eponymous film by South African artist William Kentridge – was the first exhibition Davis curated using the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and stands as the only one he lived to see realised before his death in 2015.
   

Born in Seattle, Washington in 1983, Davis had his first painting studio in high school. He briefly studied film and conceptual art at Cooper Union in New York before leaving to pursue his own artistic education. By 2004 he had moved to LA and was working at the bookshop Art Catalogues, where he could feed his appetite for a wide-reaching history of culture and, in particular, painting. Drawing on the legacy of artists ranging from Caspar David Friedrich to Mark Rothko, Romare Bearden to Kerry James Marshall, he developed a distinctive painterly style – one that engaged deeply with both the histories of representation and abstraction. Davis blended historical and contemporary source material to create images of Black life that are unbound by a specific time or place. To show Black life with beauty, majesty, joy and humour was both a risk and a necessity; Davis painted at a time of acute racism and systemic violence in the US, where identity was often weaponised as difference through the circulation of images in the media and on newly formed social media platforms.

Noah Davis is initiated by Barbican, London and DAS MINSK, Potsdam where it is on display from 7 September 2024 – 5 January 2025. The exhibition will tour to the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, from 8 June – 31 August 2025.