From September 7, 2024 to January 5, 2025, THE MINSK Kunsthaus in Potsdam is presenting the largest institutional exhibition to date of the work of the late artist Noah Davis (1983-2015). With over 50 works from the artist’s oeuvre, this major traveling exhibition entitled “Noah Davis” offers a comprehensive overview of the artist’s extraordinary oeuvre. It is the first institutional retrospective of the artist’s work, which will subsequently be shown at the Barbican in London and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.
Image above: Noah Davis, The Last Barbeque, 2008, Collection of Sam and Shanit Schwartz
This chronological retrospective showcases Davis’ tireless creativity and curiosity, which began with his first exhibition in 2007 and continued for eight years until his untimely death in 2015. The exhibition features previously unpublished paintings, works on paper and sculptures and pays particular attention to the art historical and conceptual approaches in his work, showing that art history, images, humor and, above all, people were at the heart of his work.
DAS MINSK presents modern and contemporary art with a focus on art from the former GDR, continuing the examination of the past from today’s perspective. The exhibition at DAS MINSK highlights the artist’s unique perspective and extensive knowledge of the history of figurative painting, including German art ranging from New Objectivity and Magical Realism to the Leipzig School, while showing how his motifs disrupt and challenge the so-called canon by engaging his environment and community.
With the aim of showing modern and contemporary art with a focus on art from the former GDR, DAS MINSK is committed to examining the past from a contemporary perspective. The exhibition at DAS MINSK showcases the artist’s unique perspective and extensive knowledge of the history of figurative painting, including German art ranging from New Objectivity and Magic Realism to the Leipzig School, while revealing how his motifs disrupt and challenge the so-called canon by engaging his environment and community.
Davis, who lives mainly in Los Angeles, created a series of figurative paintings that focus on the lives of black people. Believing he had a “responsibility to represent the people around him,” Davis drew on anonymous photographs he found at flea markets, in personal archives, in film and television, in music, in literature, in art history, and in his imagination to create a ravishing body of work. The characters dive into swimming pools, sleep, dance, play music, read and look at public artworks in an environment that can be both realistic and dreamlike, joyful and melancholy. Often enigmatic, sometimes uncanny, Davis’ paintings reveal a deep sense of people, humanity and the existential and universal levels of everyday life.
Noah Davis and his wife Karon Davis founded the Underground Museum, an internationally renowned institution in the historic Black and Latinx neighborhood of Arlington Heights, Los Angeles, in 2012 with the desire to “change the way people see art, the way they buy art and the way they make art.”
WHEN?
Exhibition dates: Saturday, September 07, 2024 – Sunday, January 05, 2025
Opening hours: Wednesday – Monday, 10 am – 7 pm
WHERE?
DAS MINSK Kunsthaus in Potsdam
Max-Planck-Straße 17
14473, Potsdam
