Noah Davis @ David Zwirner, London - Curated by Helen Molesworth

Noah Davis

David Zwirner, London

October 8 — November 17, 2021

Noah Davis

40 Acres and a Unicorn, 2007

© The Estate of Noah Davis

Courtesy The Estate of Noah Davis and David Zwirner

David Zwirner presents a selection of work by American artist Noah Davis (1983–2015), organised by Helen Molesworth. On view in London, the exhibition provides an overview of Noah Davis’s brief but expansive career. Following the gallery’s highly acclaimed exhibition in New York in January 2020, this is the first presentation of the artist’s work in the United Kingdom.

Noah Davis’s work is notable for its seemingly uncomplicated relationship between, on the one hand, his lush, sensual, figurative paintings and, on the other hand, an ambitious social practice project called the Underground Museum, a Black-owned-and-operated art space dedicated to the exhibition of museum-quality art in a culturally underserved African American and Latinx neighbourhood in Los Angeles. The exhibition will highlight both parts of Davis’s oeuvre through a group of his most enduring paintings as well as models, artworks, and archival materials that tell the story of the Underground Museum. The exhibition will also include a room modelled on the working offices at the Underground Museum, featuring more paintings by Noah Davis as well as BLKNWS by Kahlil Joseph, Davis’s brother; and a sculpture by Karon Davis, the artist’s widow.

Helen Molesworth notes:

Noah Davis was a painter and cofounder of the Underground Museum (UM) in Los Angeles. Despite his untimely death at the age of thirty-two, Davis’s paintings are a crucial part of the rise of figurative and representational painting in the first two decades of the twenty-first century.

Loneliness and tenderness suffuse his rigorously composed paintings, as do traces of his abiding interest in artists such as Marlene Dumas, Kerry James Marshall, Fairfield Porter, and Luc Tuymans. Noah Davis’s pictures can be slightly deceptive; they are modest in scale yet emotionally ambitious. Using a notably dry paint application and a moody palette of blues, purples, and greens, his work falls into two loose categories: There are scenes from everyday life, such as a painting of a young boy in his Sunday best, or a man reading a newspaper in a housing project designed by famed modernist architect Paul Williams. And there are paintings that traffic in magical realism, surreal images that depict the world both seen and unseen, where the presence of ancestors, ghosts, and fantasy is everywhere apparent. 

Generous, curious, and energetic, Noah Davis founded, along with his wife, the sculptor Karon Davis, the Underground Museum, a dynamic space for art and culture in Los Angeles. The UM began exceedingly modestly—Noah and Karon worked to join four storefronts in the city’s Arlington Heights neighbourhood. Noah’s dream was to exhibit “museum-quality” art in a working-class Black and Latinx neighborhood. In the early days of the UM, Davis was unable to secure museum loans, so he organized exhibitions of his work alongside that of his friends and family, and word of mouth spread about Davis’s unique curatorial gestures.

On the occasion of the exhibition, a monograph was published by David Zwirner Books, featuring a new essay by writer and musician Greg Tate and a roundtable discussion with curator Thomas Lax, artists Glenn Ligon and Julie Mehretu, and poet and scholar Fred Moten, moderated by Helen Molesworth.

Born in Seattle, Washington, NOAH DAVIS (1983–2015) studied painting at The Cooper Union School of Art in New York before moving to Los Angeles, where, in 2012, he founded the Underground Museum in the city’s Arlington Heights neighbourhood with his wife and fellow artist, Karon Davis.

Noah Davis’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Roberts & Tilton, Culver City, California (Noah Davis: Nobody, 2008, Noah Davis: The Forgotten Works, 2010, and Noah Davis: The Missing Link, 2013); Tilton Gallery, New York (Noah Davis, 2009 and Noah Davis, 2011); PAPILLION, Los Angeles (2014); and the Rebuild Foundation, Chicago (2016), among others. Noah Davis: Imitation of Wealth, which had previously been presented at the Underground Museum in 2013, opened at LA MOCA in 2015 on the same day as the artist’s untimely death at age thirty-two, due to complications from a rare cancer. In 2016, Frye Art Museum, Seattle, presented the two-person exhibition Young Blood: Noah Davis, Kahlil Joseph, The Underground Museum—the first large-scale museum show to explore Noah Davis’s work alongside that of his brother’s. In 2020, an acclaimed solo presentation of Noah Davis’s work was on view at David Zwirner, New York, a select portion of which will travel to the Underground Museum in December 2021. 

The artist’s work is featured in the landmark exhibition 30 Americans, which was organised by the Rubell Family Collection, Miami, and has been travelling extensively throughout the United States from 2008 to the present (the exhibition is currently on view at the Arlington Museum of Art, Texas, through 5 September 2021, and subsequently travels to the Columbia Museum of Art, South Carolina, in October 2021). Noah Davis’s work has been included in other notable group exhibitions, including ones held at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, California (2010 and 2020); The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2012 and 2015); Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (2017); and the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA), North Adams (2018).

Noah Davis was the recipient of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s 2013 Art Here and Now (AHAN): Studio Forum award. Works by the artist are included in the permanent collections of numerous institutions, including the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina; Rubell Museum, Miami; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York.

HELEN MOLESWORTH is a Los Angeles–based writer and curator. While chief curator at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, from 2014 to 2018, she forged a partnership with the Underground Museum and organised the exhibitions Kahlil Joseph: Double Conscience and Noah Davis: Imitation of Wealth. She is the recipient of a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship.

DAVID ZWIRNER

24 Grafton Street, London

www.davidzwirner.com

Alice Neel: Freedom @ David Zwirner, New York

Alice Neel: Freedom

David Zwirner, New York

February 26 — April 13, 2019

ALICE NEEL

Joe Gould, 1933. 

© The Estate of Alice Neel 

Courtesy The Estate of Alice Neel and David Zwirner

Art is two things: a search for a road and a search for freedom. It’s very hard to get freedom. You know all these things in life keep crawling over you all the time, so it’s very hard to feel free.

—Alice Neel1

David Zwirner presents an exhibition of paintings and significant works on paper by ALICE NEEL (1900–1984).

Spanning six decades of the artist’s career, Alice Neel: Freedom is organized by Ginny Neel of The Estate of Alice Neel. The exhibition focuses on the artist’s portrayal of the nude figure and the ways in which Alice Neel resolutely challenged traditional perceptions of sexuality, motherhood, and beauty.

One of the foremost American figurative painters of the twentieth century, Alice Neel was a humanist—she was fascinated by people. She loved to paint them in all their complexities—to penetrate and reveal their fears and anxieties, their defiance and survival. She also loved to paint the unadorned human figure, and her nude portraits explore the body with frankness while celebrating the individuality of each of her subjects. Alice Neel broke through conventional gender expectations and restrictions in order to paint the way she saw the world, and these paintings exemplify the courage and the freedom with which she approached her work and her life. In their mastery of form, color, and implied social commentary, these works are as relevant today as when they were painted.

The exhibition comprises significant loans drawn from museum and private collections. Among the earliest works on view is Well Baby Clinic (1928–1929). Painted from memory by the artist shortly after having given birth to her second daughter, the work is as much personal as it is political in that it presents an ambivalent and deeply nuanced image of childbirth. Of this painting, Alice Neel would later recall her interest in "the purity of the nurses’ outfits, and the white walls of the hospital, so neat, and then sloppy humanity there, all ragged at the edges."2

Also included in the show are tender representations of infancy and childhood, such as Andrew (1978), a portrait of Alice Neel’s infant grandson, and Isabetta (1934), which depicts her young daughter at six years of age. Other works in the exhibition, including Symbols (Doll and Apple) (1932; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), Margaret Evans Pregnant (1978; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston), and the mother and child portrait Betty Homitzky and Jevin (1968) further complicate and challenge how pregnancy and motherhood could be envisioned and represented.

Among the works on view are depictions of friends and acquaintances, such as Nadya Nude (1933), shown lying on a bed of patterned and draped fabric. The pose is echoed in paintings such as John Perreault (1972; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York), which depicts the art critic and curator unclothed. These works upend and challenge the art-historical trope of the reclining nude with Alice Neel’s singular gaze and approach to the figure. Also included is Joe Gould (1933), which presents the eccentric bohemian with multiple penises, a painting that is at once shocking and affectionate.

As Helen Molesworth notes in a newly commissioned essay published in the accompanying exhibition catalogue, "Some of Neel’s abiding questions were: What is the gaze we have for nakedness? What is nakedness without sex? Is there a gaze that encompasses sexuality but is not necessarily about desire? Can desire exist without objectification? These questions are perhaps more apposite now than ever.… Perhaps this is why these pictures feel so relevant now. They are images of nakedness that are neither pornographic nor pathological, medical, clinical, patronizing, nor demeaning.… These are pictures of what it looks like to be curious about people when they are naked."3

ALICE NEEL was born in 1900 in Merion Square, Pennsylvania, and died in 1984 in New York. Although she exhibited sporadically early in her career, her work has been shown widely from the 1960s onwards. In 1971, a comprehensive solo exhibition of Alice Neel’s paintings was held at her alma mater, Moore College of Art and Design, Philadelphia, and in 1974, she had her first retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. It was followed by a large-scale presentation of eighty-three paintings in 1975 at the Georgia Museum of Art, The University of Georgia, Athens. In 1978, the Graham Gallery, New York, organized the first retrospective dedicated to the artist’s works on paper, and in 1979, a survey of her paintings was co-hosted by the Universit of Bridgeport and The Silvermine Guild of Artists in Connecticut.

To celebrate the centenary of the artist’s birth, the Philadelphia Museum of Art organized Alice Neel, a solo exhibition of Alice Neel’s work, which debuted in 2000 at the Whitney Museum of American Art before traveling to the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, among other venues. In 2010, the survey exhibition Alice Neel: Painted Truths was organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and traveled to the Whitechapel Gallery, London, and Moderna Museet Malmö, Sweden. In 2016, the Ateneum Art Museum, Helsinki, presented Alice Neel: Painter of Modern Life, which traveled to the Gemeentemuseum, The Hague, and the Fondation Vincent van Gogh in Arles, France, before concluding at the Deichtorhallen Hamburg. The artist’s work is included in numerous museum collections internationally. David Zwirner has represented The Estate of Alice Neel since 2008, and Alice Neel: Freedom marks the fifth solo exhibition of the artist’s work at the gallery.

1. Alice Neel, quoted in Patricia Hills, Alice Neel (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1983), p. 18.

2. Ibid., p. 23.

3. Helen Molesworth, "Looking with and Looking at Alice Neel," in Alice Neel: Freedom. Exh. cat. (New York: David Zwirner Books, 2019), pp. 16–17.

Alice Neel: Freedom

Exhibition Catalogue

Autor: Molesworth Helen

New York: David Zwirner Books, 2019

DAVID ZWIRNER

537 West 20th Street, New York

www.davidzwirner.com

Updated 09/10/2022