Noah Davis

★★★☆☆

On until 11 May 2025

The institution can be the best and the worst for an artist. Davis’ canvases, for example, are remarkable. The figures he captures mid-air, half-asleep, or between planes give an account of time more sensitively than the Victorian portrait photograph. These works make a justifiable claim on the market and have earned a spot in the public gallery’s canon.

Yet Davis was also the animator of some middling social art projects and a conceptual artist whose concepts hardly graduated art school. The museum venerates these, as though to make him a Basquiat for a new generation. This does the painter no favours. To celebrate, as this show does, that Davis was “creative” from a young age is trivial. To indulge a hollow reading of race in his Jerry Springer paintings is irresponsible. To fetishise his illness and death younger than Jesus gleefully opportunistic. These missteps, in turn, cast doubt on the paint’s surface.


notes and notices are short and curt exhibition reviews. Read more:

Megan Rooney, Echoes & Hours at Kettle’s Yard ★★☆☆☆

Megan Rooney

Echoes & Hours

Echoes & Hours

★★☆☆☆

For all this bravado, Rooney’s compositions offer only a very surface experience of abstraction.

Divine Southgate-Smith, Navigator at Nicoletti ★☆☆☆☆

Divine Southgate-Smith

Navigator

Navigator

★☆☆☆☆

It is too late to save the regime, yet too early to mourn it.

Liam Gillick, The Sleepwalkers at Maureen Paley ★★★☆☆

Liam Gillick

The Sleepwalkers

The Sleepwalkers

★★★☆☆

Gillick’s practice lacks obviously consistent character, save for it is sparseness of means and the ungraspability of its referents.

Herman Chong, The Book of Equators at Amanda Wilkinson ★★☆☆☆

Herman Chong

The Book of Equators

The Book of Equators

★★☆☆☆

Chong was probably reading some epic while painting his Equator pictures.

Patricia Ferguson, Each Little Scar at FILET ★★★★☆

Patricia Ferguson

Each Little Scar

Each Little Scar

★★★★☆

No medium is better suited to anxiety and dread.

Alexandre Canonico, Still at Ab Anbar ★★★☆☆

Alexandre Canonico

Still

Still

★★★☆☆

Conanico’s slight structures look like they could take flight at any moment.

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