Noah Davis

DAS MINSK Kunsthaus in Potsdam presents the largest 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 spanning the artist’s complete oeuvre, this major touring exhibition offers a comprehensive overview of Davis’ extraordinary practice. It will be the artist’s inaugural institutional retrospective, which will subsequently travel to the Barbican, London and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. 

Curated chronologically, the retrospective presents Davis’ relentless creativity and curiosity commencing with his first exhibition in 2007, spanning eight years until his untimely death in 2015. Featuring previously unseen paintings, works on paper and sculpture, 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 the epicenter of his work. 

Committed to showing modern and contemporary art with a focus on art from the former GDR, DAS MINSK continues its conversation 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, while it simultaneously reveals, how his motifs riff on the so-called canon and question it by including his surroundings and community. 

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 ravishing body of work. Figures dive into swimming pools, sleep, dance, play music, read and look at public art in settings that can be both realistic and dreamlike, joyful, and melancholic. Often enigmatic, sometimes uncanny, Davis’ paintings reveal a deep 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 renowned institution in the historically Black and Latinx neighborhood of Arlington Heights, Los Angeles.

The exhibition Noah Davis is initiated by Barbican, London and DAS MINSK, Potsdam. This project is organized in close collaboration with the Estate of Noah Davis and David Zwirner Gallery.

DAS MINSK, Potsdam: September 7, 2024–January 5, 2025. Exhibition curated by Paola Malavassi

Barbican, London: February 6–May 11, 2025. Exhibition curated by Eleanor Nairne and Wells Fray-Smith

Hammer Museum, Los Angeles: June 8–August 31, 2025. The exhibition is organized by the Barbican, London and initiated with DAS MINSK, Potsdam. The exhibition is curated by Eleanor Nairne and Wells Fray-Smith. The presentation at the Hammer is organized by Aram Moshayedi, interim chief curator.