PRE ORDER FOR DELIVERY - This striking exhibition catalogue celebrates the late artist whose deeply emotional works intermingled realism with abstraction to address complex themes of identity, race, and community.

Noah Davis opens at the Barbican on 6 Feb 2025 - 11 May 2025

American artist Noah Davis (1983–2015) believed that ‘painting does something to your soul that nothing else can. It is visceral and immediate.’ Drawing on art history, personal archives and anonymous photography found in flea markets in Los Angeles, he compiled a ravishing body of figurative paintings that explore a range of Black life. Figures dive into swimming pools, sleep, dance and look at public art in settings that can be both realistic and dreamlike, exuberant, and melancholic. Alongside his celebrated paintings, Davis also made drawings, collages, and sculptures, and co-founded the Underground Museum.

This elegantly designed volume documents the span of Davis’s career in painting and attends to his commitment to representation in the art world and community engagement at the Underground Museum. Alongside new scholarship from the influential writers, artists and musicians like Tina M. Campt, Claudia Rankine, Marlene Dumas and Jason Moran, this catalog features high-quality reproductions of Davis’s more widely-known works in painting, sculpture and paper as well as previously unseen archival material. &A vital resource for understanding the depth and significance of Davis’s artistic practice, this beautiful volume reveals how humanity, humor, imagination, and above all, people, were the epicenter of his work.

Edited by Wells Fray-Smith, Paola Malavassi and Eleanor Nairne

272 pages with 200 colour illustrations
Hardcover
7 ½ x 9 ¾ in (19.5 x 25cm)