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:

Botond Keresztesi, NPC (No-one Paints Chrysopoeia) at Seventeen ★★★☆☆

Botond Keresztesi

NPC (No-one Paints Chrysopoeia)

NPC (No-one Paints Chrysopoeia)

★★★☆☆

There is no “too much” in this fantasy meme game.

Linder, Danger Came Smiling at Hayward Gallery ★★★★☆

Linder

Danger Came Smiling

Danger Came Smiling

★★★★☆

Linder’s second-wave feminist propositions were ruthlessly superseded.

Robert Rauschenberg, ROCI at Thaddeus Ropac ★★★☆☆

Robert Rauschenberg

ROCI

ROCI

★★★☆☆

This project outs Rauschenberg as a propagandist if not an outright Fed.

Vlatka Horvat, The Croatian Pavilion in Venice ★★☆☆☆

Vlatka Horvat

By the Means at Hand

By the Means at Hand

★★☆☆☆

This closed circulation project speaks to and agrees with only itself.

Sosa Joseph, Pennungal at David Zwirner ★★★★★

Sosa Joseph

Pennungal: Lives of women and girls

Pennungal: Lives of women and girls

★★★★★

The night, finally, recognises despair and witnesses infanticide.”

Urs Fischer, Scratch & Sniff at Sadie Coles ★★★☆☆

Urs Fischer

Scratch & Sniff

Scratch & Sniff

★★★☆☆

It’s too early for a funeral, yet there’s no other reprieve in this commodity cult.

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