Sheer Tenderness

Jessica Simmons-Reid visits Noah Davis’s posthumous survey at the Hammer Museum.

By Jessica Simmons-ReidNovember 15, 2025

• Art & Architecture

ONE OF THE MOST haunting paintings in Noah Davis’s recent posthumous survey at the Hammer Museum in L.A. depicts a supine figure resting in the bow of a boat, the vessel’s shape delineated by a glimpse of water at the canvas’s top edge (Untitled, 2015). Installed in the final gallery of the chronologically organized exhibition, this work was one of several large-scale, untitled paintings that the Los Angeles–based artist completed in the final month of his life, before tragically succumbing to a rare form of cancer at the age of 32.

Modeled after a found photograph, the work portrays the subject from a close, foreshortened perspective—the most technically difficult vantage from which to accurately render a human form—thereby placing the viewer within the intimate confines of the picture plane. Clad in light, monochromatic clothing that complements the muted tones of the vessel, the figure reclines at an oblique angle, with one arm folded above their head while their other outstretched arm lightly cradles a sun hat. Their lower limbs dangle from the edge of a bench or cushion and remain mostly cropped from view, with the exception of the right knee and thigh, which point toward the viewer. Gesturally, it’s an impressive tableau, recalling the dexterous brushwork of Manet, Luc Tuymans, or Elizabeth Peyton. Davis possessed a loose yet confident command of his materials, wielding a minimum of visual information for maximum effect and adroitly harnessing his thinned-out paint’s stubborn insistence on bleeding. Notice, for example, the tiny string of drips that he allowed to spill over the otherwise cleanly painted edge of the boat. These discreet marks not only anchor the pictorial illusion of water intrinsic to the scene; they also embody a gestural interplay between intention and improvisation inherent to the choreography of painting.

The complexity of Davis’s composition and the economy of his mark-making is matched by the subtle sophistication of his palette, which here includes an array of pallid grays, mossy greens, and florid pinks. Although Davis appears to have initially rendered his subject in peach and umber hues, he lightly coated most of his canvas with a sallow, sage gray wash that dribbles down over the composition like a creeping sickness, partially veiling the warm flesh tones of the reclining figure and completely graying out their face, which appears hollow and jaundiced. And while I hesitate to impose a biographical reading on Davis’s work—a method of interpretation that too often privileges personality (or, in this case, illness) over material, form, and concept—this specific painting unequivocally lingers in the somber liminal space between life and death. From a palette that allegorizes the quiet dichotomy of health and disease to the mysterious countenance of the reclining figure (are they asleep, mourning, aggrieved, at peace?), and finally the emblematic presence of the boat—a universal symbol of the odyssey between two shores and often a mythological ferry to the afterlife—this work offers a potent meditation on imminent mortality, the corporeal form drifting back into primal waters.

The sheer tenderness of this scene found echoes in numerous paintings throughout the exhibition, a testament to Davis’s emotional ingenuity as an artist. In fact, on account of the inclusion of handwritten notes, studio ephemera, and poignant video documentation from Davis’s life, the curatorial conceit undergirding the entire installation was similarly infused with tenderness—surprising for a traveling retrospective (the exhibition originated at the Barbican in London and went to DAS MINSK in Potsdam, Germany). While organized chronologically, the galleries at the Hammer predominantly coalesced around discrete visual themes, including the artist’s use of found photographic reference materials, his interest in Egyptian cosmology, and his dedication, in painting and in life, to vernacular settings and narratives that illuminated Black subjects.

In 2012, for example, he and his wife, the artist Karon Davis, co-founded the highly lauded Underground Museum in the historically Black and Brown neighborhood of Arlington Heights in Los Angeles, where the couple aimed to bring “world-class art” to a local demographic often overlooked by the city’s reigning institutions. Davis’s intimate, quotidian scenes of people of color are often imbued with surreal undertones. In 40 Acres and a Unicorn (2007), for example, a young boy straddles the back of an ivory unicorn, the creature a symbol of the illusory myth of reparations, while in Painting for My Dad (2011), a lonesome man beholds a celestial abyss from the edge of a craggy peak, another wrenching visual metaphor for the psychology of loss (Davis’s father similarly suffered from terminal cancer). In Isis (2009), Davis’s wife appears with swooping arcs of marigold wings after the titular Egyptian goddess, an ode to their domestic bliss. In many of his later paintings, Davis suffused vibrant snippets of urban life with fertile moments of abstraction, compositional decisions that revel in painting’s haptic, fluid pleasures. This is particularly evident in Pueblo del Rio, an ambitious series of paintings from 2014 that he embarked on shortly after his diagnosis.

In the exhibition, this body of work occupied its own gallery, which directly preceded the presentation of Davis’s final four paintings. The series takes its title from the eponymous Los Angeles housing project, designed in 1941 by the renowned Black architect Paul Revere Williams, whom Davis had previously invoked in The Architect (2009). While originally rooted in the noble premise of a communal garden city, Pueblo del Rio eventually succumbed to violence, an outcome that Davis reimagined with tranquil scenes of the campus populated with performing ballerinas, artists, and musicians.

The Conductor (2014) offers one of the most dynamic examples of these juxtapositions. In this work, a man clothed in an elegant black tailcoat (the work’s titular subject) stands atop a pair of bright, apricot-hued chairs (the palette’s only shock of warmth) in front of a flat-roofed, cornflower-blue house. The house and its enclosed doorway occupy the center of the composition and together mirror the dimensions of the nearly square canvas, creating a series of concentric geometries that artfully recall Josef Albers’s Homage to the Square series (1950–76). The conductor grasps a paintbrush in his right hand—ostensibly orchestrating the construction of the painting itself—while his left hand partially covers his mouth, a posture suggestive of a clandestine whisper (his bearing, though sparsely rendered, is highly emotive, a common quality in Davis’s work). Crucially, the conductor appears to be gazing directly at the viewer, thus puncturing the elusive fourth wall and situating the work within a rich lineage of paintings about painting, including Velázquez’s famed Las Meninas (1656) as well as Kerry James Marshall’s Untitled (2009), a mise en abyme of a painting within a painting. This blurring of perspectival boundaries is further cemented by the conductor’s cast shadow, which simultaneously situates him both within and above the surface of the picture plane. While Davis clearly delineates the subject, the chairs, and the basic contours and outline of the house with figurative intent, the remainder of the composition dissolves into translucent layers of oceanic tones that approach but eschew complete abstraction, revealing his deep understanding of painting’s luminous potentialities.

Davis never ceased making, even when seriously ill. While recovering from the ravages of chemotherapy, he continued his material experiments via a series of works on paper titled Seventy Works (2014), which he completed, by necessity, from the confines of his bed. The Hammer presentation included 21 of these 70 small drawings (all roughly seven by five inches), which were installed in two staggered rows across one long, expansive wall. They are disarmingly raw and their surfaces quite beautiful, with weeping stains and mottled brushstrokes of saturated color. As totems of expression and resilience, they intermingle myriad collage elements (photographs of modernist sculptures, verdant gardens, and close friends, such as the artist Mark Bradford) with drawn, painted, and printed marks that scale down the scope of the paintings to an intimate, holdable form—like unique graphemes of a larger language system.

There is always something particularly revealing about a painter’s drawings: often needlessly derided as preparatory or tangential, a drawing can function as a visceral receptacle for a deluge of unabashed marks, offering an immediate somatic translation of an artist’s visual vocabulary. Here, through these small works, we are offered an intimate, microscopic view into the process of an artist who, while physically hampered by disease, managed to work tenaciously.

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Featured image: Noah Davis, Painting for My Dad, 2011. Oil on canvas. 76 × 91 in. (193 × 231.1 cm). Rubell Museum. Courtesy of the Estate of Noah Davis and David Zwirner. Photo: Kerry McFate.