“We did it!” » Karon Davis can’t suppress this little cry of victory as she wanders, on September 2, into the retrospective that Das Minsk, a private museum in Potsdam, Germany, is dedicating to her late husband, Noah Davis, an American painter of immense lost talent in 2015, at the age of 32, to a very rare cancer. With each painting, Karon Davis associates a memory. “There is a bit of my DNA in these works” she says, emphasizing that she was also her husband’s assistant. Take the canvas titled Isis, which takes its name from the Egyptian deity guardian of the home. Noah Davis painted it in 2009, inspired by a photo of her in front of her first house, in West Adams, south of Los Angeles. “I raised my arms and Noah exclaimed, ‘Stay there! You are Isis” she says.
His heart is heavy at the intensity Painting for my dad, that Noah Davis created in 2011 after the death of his father, where he is represented in jeans and a T-shirt, with his shoulders hunched, with his back to nothing, as if he were between two worlds. The composition is reminiscent of the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich, the 19th century German romantic painter.my century, known for its characters immersed in deep melancholy and its landscapes that emerge from the fog. Rarely has the theme of grief been illustrated with such force.
For many, the exhibition in Das Minsk is a revelation. And as it will tour in 2025 at the Barbican Center in London and then at the prestigious Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, it is the harbinger of the global recognition that Noah Davis had waited in vain throughout his life. “He knew he was a visionary, ahead of his time, confirms his wife. He often said, even before his illness: “When I am no longer here, my work will outlive me.” »
Today nothing is missing to make his destiny a legend: a lightning death, a short but abundant work, seductive with its colorful harmonies, figurative, therefore accessible and enigmatic at the same time. And, above all, a powerful art dealer, David Zwirner, who for four years took the estate under his protection and catapulted its prices to stratospheric levels, from 500,000 to 3 million dollars (from 447,500 to 2.4 million euros). .
For this kingmaker, it is not about making Noah Davis a new Jean-Michel Basquiat, black painter and favorite of the eighties, who died of an overdose in 1988, at the age of 27. Born twenty-three years apart, the two artistic comets are polar opposites. It was not rage but anger that Noah Davis printed on the canvas, when each Basquiat brushstroke was intended to be a punch. Less tormented than his elder, devoured by his addictions, the young Californian cultivated the aura of head of the family and unifier of the tribe.
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