DAS MINSK KUNSTHAUS PRESENTS THE LARGEST INSTITUTIONAL RETROSPECTIVE TO DATE OF AMERICAN PAINTER NOAH DAVIS
On View: September 7, 2024 – January 5, 2025
On View: September 7, 2024 – January 5, 2025
May 14, 2024 (Potsdam, Germany) – The DAS MINSK Kunsthaus in Potsdam is presenting the most extensive institutional survey to date of the late artist Noah Davis (1983-2015), on view from September 7, 2024, to January 5, 2025. Bringing together over 50 works that span the artist’s complete oeuvre, this major touring exhibition, titled 'Noah Davis,' offers a comprehensive overview of the artist’s extraordinary practice. It marks the artist’s first institutional retrospective, which will subsequently travel to the Barbican in London and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.
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Curated chronologically, the retrospective showcases Davis' relentless creativity and curiosity, beginning with his first exhibition in 2007 and spanning the eight years until his untimely death in 2015. Featuring previously unseen paintings, works on paper, and sculptures, the exhibition pays special attention to the art historical and conceptual approaches in his practice, revealing that art history, imagery, humor, and above all, people, were at the epicenter of his work.
Committed to exhibiting modern and contemporary art with a focus on art from the former GDR, DAS MINSK continues its dialogue with the past from a contemporary perspective. The show at DAS MINSK highlights the artist’s unique perspective and extensive knowledge of the history of figurative painting, including German art, ranging from Neue Sachlichkeit and Magischer Realismus to the Leipziger Schule. It simultaneously reveals how his motifs riff on the so-called canon and question it by incorporating his surroundings and community.
Committed to exhibiting modern and contemporary art with a focus on art from the former GDR, DAS MINSK continues its dialogue with the past from a contemporary perspective. The show at DAS MINSK highlights the artist’s unique perspective and extensive knowledge of the history of figurative painting, including German art, ranging from Neue Sachlichkeit and Magischer Realismus to the Leipziger Schule. It simultaneously reveals how his motifs riff on the so-called canon and question it by incorporating his surroundings and community.
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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 him, Davis drew on anonymous photography found in flea markets, personal archives, film and television, music, literature, art history, and his imagination to create a captivating body of work. Figures dive into swimming pools, sleep, dance, play music, read, and gaze at public art in settings that can be both realistic and dreamlike, joyful, and melancholic. Often enigmatic, sometimes uncanny, Davis' paintings reveal a profound feeling for people, humanity, and the existential and universal layers of everyday life.
Motivated by the desire to 'change the way people view art, the way they buy art, the way they make art,' Noah Davis and his wife Karon Davis co-founded The Underground Museum in 2012, an internationally acclaimed institution in the historically Black and Latinx neighborhood of Arlington Heights, Los Angeles.
Motivated by the desire to 'change the way people view art, the way they buy art, the way they make art,' Noah Davis and his wife Karon Davis co-founded The Underground Museum in 2012, an internationally acclaimed institution in the historically Black and Latinx neighborhood of Arlington Heights, Los Angeles.
The exhibition 'Noah Davis' is initiated by the Barbican in London and DAS MINSK in Potsdam. This project is organized in close collaboration with the Estate of Noah Davis and the David Zwirner Gallery.
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