David-Jeremiah: The Fire This Time

The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth presents David-Jeremiah: The Fire This Time, organized by guest curator Christopher Blay, an artist, curator, writer, and TCU graduate. The exhibition, which extends the museum’s longstanding tradition of championing emerging artists, will be on view August 17 through November 2, 2025, in the first-floor galleries adjacent to masterworks from the permanent collection.

David-Jeremiah is a multidisciplinary conceptual artist from Oak Cliff, Texas, whose practice spans painting, inverted-performance installation, sculpture, photography, text, and mixed media.

Through narrative, apotheosis, humor, and personification, his work explores the complexities of humanity’s perpetual cycles: self-reflection, contradiction, and unbecoming. At the core of his practice is a commitment to examining how we rival the very virtues we claim to uphold—often weaponizing them against one another for sport. His approach reimagines engagement with constructs such as transcendence, ritual, agency, and man, rendered through the medium of the Lamborghini. This presentation includes new pieces shown for the first time—the final polychromatic EE (Emma Esse) set of seven paintings that complete the series.

“It has been such a pleasure to work with David-Jeremiah and guest curator Christopher Blay to bring this exceptional body of work to the Modern,” says Chief Curator Andrea Karnes. “The installation on view in The Fire This Time situates larger-than-life figures around campsites to continue the artist’s evolving narrative around the complications of being a Black man in America, accounting for its joys and traumas, and extending the conversation to explore the complexities of individuality and humanness.”

Blay comments, "I’ve had the unique opportunity of working with David-Jeremiah previously and on this pivotal exhibition of his work at the Modern. The artist's ‘inverted-performance installation,’ as he describes it, has a rich conversation with Conceptualism and Minimalism. It has been a privilege to work with David-Jeremiah, and I can't wait to share this exhibition with the public.”

Throughout David-Jeremiah’s career and in the series featured in this exhibition, fire has been a significant motif. Figuratively, fire is the crucible through which the artist has passed. In the presentation at the Modern, his paintings-as-figures bask in the glow of embers that, conceptually, the viewer creates.

David-Jeremiah continuously engages with the ritualistic context of fire and flame, including in his I Drive Thee series of tondo paintings. These paintings were recently exhibited as part of the artist’s 2024‒25 exhibition I Drive Thee at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts. L’Anima, 2023, the final painting in this tondo series, was cremated and exhibited in urns designed after the steering wheel of a Lamborghini Anton.

David-Jeremiah places the mythos of the Lamborghini automobile at the conceptual center of his practice. The artist’s love of Lamborghinis began in childhood and has since emerged as a way of exploring the dichotomy of beauty and violence, in man and in the fighting bulls for which most Lamborghini models are named.