"When the touring Noah Davis (1983-2015) survey first opened at Das Minsk, in Potsdam, in September 2024, critics hailed the late American painter as "an artist of our time" for his ability to balance social relevance with artistic independence. The exhibition comprised 60 works, a fraction of the 400 he made in total. They showed Davis to be a gifted colourist, a nimble storyteller, and an artist wielding erudite art history and keen political nous with equal dexterity."
"As the exhibition heads to the final of its four stops, at the Philadelphia Art Museum, what is most surprising is that it is still racking up firsts. In Germany it was billed as the artist's first European retrospective and at the Barbican, in February, as his UK debut. At the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles in June, it was his first on the West Coast, where he was living at the time of his death,"
"That art market momentum is building around Davis's work is clear. Last November, his 2008 painting The Casting Call sold for $2m at Sotheby's in New York, doubling the presale low estimate and beating his auction record by 33%. But the work has its own, internal momentum too. Davis is "very good at 'show, don't tell'," Nairne says. "These are not didactic paintings. They don't have singular meanings or stories or morals that they're trying to impart on us. They're very open, porous, multivalent works,""
The touring Noah Davis survey opened at Das Minsk in Potsdam in September 2024 and included 60 works from roughly 400 paintings he produced. The paintings demonstrate Davis's strengths as a colourist, storyteller, and an artist fluent in art-history and political nuance. The tour accumulated institutional firsts across Germany, the UK, Los Angeles and the Philadelphia Art Museum. Davis died at 32, having had only two commercial gallery shows and no museum retrospective at the time of his death. Market interest has increased, exemplified by The Casting Call selling for $2m at Sotheby's. The paintings are described as open, porous and multivalent rather than didactic.
Read at The Art Newspaper - International art news and events
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