Noah Davis @ The Barbican

The Missing Link 4, 2013

Davis was one of those rare painters who could bring the political, aesthetic innovation, humour and poignancy, figuration and abstraction into a single frame. Davis's dexterous works exist in a difficult-to-place in between world, neither everyday reality, nor fantastical other worldly. The one thread running through all his work might be his commitment to the plight of invisible and marginalized people, evident in paintings populated by African Americans. But what is most striking is the way that Davis paints his figures. They rarely have discernible facial features, are typically shown in imbalanced frames or placed within fantastic narratives, in poses suggesting or depicting movement through environments, most often the street. And yet, we also see frames within frames everywhere in these paintings, the figures rarely feel entrapped, mostly because they are in motion. 

Pueblo del Rio: Arabesque, 2014

The face as the mark of identity and recognition of the individual is typically removed from Davis's black figures. Faces are erased, masked, veiled, blurred, splashed with paint, silenced through the removal of the mouth. The figures' facelessness makes them both individuals in a challenging world, and metonymical black figures in American history. 

40 Acres and a Unicorn, 2007

Another striking element of Davis's paintings is their surface. Beyond or in addition to the translucence created through his use of rabbit skin glue under paint and the scraping and washing of some canvases, surfaces are emphasized in scenes filled with reflections, squares and frames within frames. Drips, bleeds, shadows, cover urban streets and landscapes comprised of blocks of colour. This turns the backgrounds or space around the figures into areas as variegated and fascinating as the figures themselves. For example, in The Missing Link 4, a body of water in front of a modernist building captures the reflection of sky and concrete, merging with two figures playing. The texture of water and reflection is as compelling and curious as the housing project filling the upper two thirds of the painting. 

You Are ... 2012

Davis is one of those painters who begins from photographs and lens based media, mostly representing an interpretation of how black people are shown in these media. Several powerful paintings in the exhibition show the contrasts and constant flexibility and fluidity of Davis's paintings. Those beginning from anonymous amateur and family photographs find altogether different characters, relaxed, casual, at times exuding intimacy and connection. Other figures are isolated, alone, walking through worlds surrounded by painting and art, but unable to connect to other people. In 2012, Davis made a series of paintings inspired by midday trash television in which everything is constructed, stylized, and forced. These paintings, such as You Are ... are highly designed, the figures strategically placed, manipulated. Again, the figures are faceless, emphasizing the manipulations to staging, performance, and the cult of the TV personality and the de-individualization of the black participants.

Painting for My Dad, 2011

Davis's pictures can also inhabit the other wordly: in paintings such as 40 Acres and a Unicorn we see ghosts and unicorns. In others modernism meets black aesthetics and mysticism, in which impossible things happen, such as ballerinas performing at a housing project, and in a painting such as The Missing Link 1, a young boy levitates in a garden as other children look on. 

The Missing Link 1, 2013

Davis's references are wide ranging and eclectic. We see a man walking through an urban environment that resembles a Rothko painting, an exhibition curated at his own Underground Museum in 2012 titled, Imitation of Wealth referencing the Doulas Sirk film in which a black girl passes as white - in which a white woman has a moral breakdown, in which white culture distorts the self-perception of black people. There are also references to Mondrian and the geometricization of the image, Friedrich and the wanderer, though Davis's journeys in the night. Marlene Dumas, Peter Doig, Luc Tuymans are also also recognizeable in receding figures in ambiguous landscapes.

Untitled, 2015

While Davis's work is vast and diverse, intellectually rich, aesthetically innovative, and most significantly, committed to a politics of bringing unseen and unseeing people to visibility, as well as giving them the opportunity to see art, it's also extremely intimate. Viewers will sense the bond between three young men hanging out on a doorstep, surrounded by project housing, or two women asleep on a sofa. Perhaps most intimate are the paintings in which Davis himself is present, either literally as in a painting of his wife in a magic yellow costume or in a painting of a funeral in the distance, nevertheless within reach. It's impossible to see these paintings without noticing Davis's very personal spirit hovering around the walls. And it's impossible to see the exhibition without paying heed to the shadow of Davis's early death. As the exhibition presents it, the memory of Davis's art is clouded by death. 

Untitled, 2015

It's as though the fever to paint is so high as he approaches the end that he has to include everything he knows in his paintings. The history of art, the history of representation of black people, the way they are treated, pictured in images. Davis's body of work speaks to universal issues, and yet, is so intimate and personal about his isolation and the tragedy on its way to him. Leaving the world on his own, isolated, walking through a world covered in painting. And when he paints other people in the final works, they live together with art, their spaces literally taken over by paint, merged together with paintings on walls, paint dripping down onto the body, wiping it away.

Verborgene Schätze. Werke aus rheinischen Privatsammlungen @ Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf

Gerhard Richter, Blumen, 1977, CR425-3

I braved the dead of German winter to travel to foggy Düsseldorf for this important exhibition of Gerhard Richter's works from private collections. I loved seeing many paintings in real life for the first time. In particular, a handful of early trompe l'oeil paintings, including Untitled (1966, CR701) and Small Door (1968, 210-4) were a treat. In these early works, Richter is clearly working out how to do what he needs to do. He will ultimately move on from the trompe l'oeil, but it makes sense that he was looking there to explore the specific questions of realism and illusion in painting that have concerned him over a lifetime. One of the exhibition texts claimed that Richter is concerned to pursue visual concepts. He is, but I would argue that the goal is more specific and more visual: Richter is searching for how to envision certain ideas about painting. 

Gerhard Richter, Small Door, 1968, CR210-4

Because the exhibition displayed works from private collections in the region, many of them were from early in his career, painted before he became internationally famous and the prices skyrocketed. While Richter made sculptures, mirrored works, and glass panels in this period, it was interesting to see that the people of the Rhineland chose to purchase paintings. That said, there was a small mirrored ball, however, it was exhibited as an object to be reflected on, rather than a reflective surface to create transformation in the room as his mirrored works are designed to do. There was one early sculptural work (Tube, 1965, CR59c), his only film (Volker Bradke, 1966) and some early self photographs, but the exhibition's focus was very much on Richter as a painter. 

Gerhard Richter, I.S.A, 1984, CR555

I have been looking at Richter's work for decades, but the exhibition reminded me of the sheer variety of his application of paint on the canvas. Of course, this is something that can only be appreciated when together with the paintings themselves, as opposed to seeing them in reproduction. It's not simply that he uses different tools - made visible through the density and path of the paint - but also that Richter uses a myriad of tools to apply paint in vastly different ways. Five small grey works from the 1960s and 1970s, each of which asks the question of "how can I apply grey paint to this canvas?" are a great illustration. Sponged, streaked, dragged, horizontally, vertically, or dancing across the canvas. The result is always different. Similarly, he asks the viewer to regard these differences, particularly, as the behaviour of light changes depending on the application of grey paint. Richter's paintings are always in motion, within the frame, in dynamic conversations with each other, and again with their viewers.

Gerhard Richter, Seascape, 1968, CR194-23

The importance of being together with the paintings was never more emphasized than when standing in front of the seascapes and alps which are among some of the most stunning of his grey paintings. In a Seascape such as CR194-23, 1968, the movement of the brush across the work is sumptuous. Here, Richter creates the line between sea and sky through technique and application of paint, but it's difficult to say where that line is. Something changes, but where on the canvas? We can say "here is the sea" and "here is the sky," but where the one becomes the other is unclear. This is in total contrast to other seascapes such as Seascape (Grey, Cloudy), CR241-2, 1969 with its artificial horizon line. Both paintings depict the enigma of the sea, abstracting it in opposite ways. 

Gerhard Richter, Seascape (Grey, Cloudy), 1969 CR241-2

Perhaps the most striking thing about the paintings on exhibition were the frames. As they are from private collections, the works are owned by someone other than Richter, and therefore, I assume that he has no say in how they are displayed or protected. Richter's paintings hold within them a complex discourse on framing; most often, frames within the paintings are removed, off-centre, in motion, or a subject recedes from the frame. Thus, a frame for Richter is something to play with, to remove, resist, pull away, to ensure his visual discourse on obscurity, transformation, and ambivalence. 

Untitled (Reddish), 1971

Untitled, 1966, CR70-a

When a hefty wooden frame is placed around a small abstract painting, it is trapped, shut down, its discourse on chance and motion removed. In frames added by collectors, Richter's works are forced to sit still like prisoners in an empty cell. The vulnerability and fragility of a small work such as Untitled (Reddish), 1971 is lost because it is no longer connected to the world, rather it is isolated when made precious and priceless objects. That said, when a work such as Pillow Picture (1970, 255-5) is hung next to Untitled, 1966, CR70-a which is captured inside an arrangement of no less than three frames, the Pillow Picture becomes luminous and perfect, its variegations brought to the foreground through comparison. The tender tiny painting pulsates with light, looking ominously like a television screen. There is an optical illusion here that would be lost if this little gem were placed inside frames. 

Chiharu Shiota, The Soul Trembles @ Grand Palais

Chiharu Shiota, Uncertain Journey, 2016/2024

Chiharu Shiota's exhibition at the Grand Palais is magesterial. Visitors enter into a haunted space filled with frames of steel boats, and Shiota's signature red yarn creating complex webs of bleeding life in Uncertain Journey (2016/2024). On many levels the weave of red yarn is mesmerizing: most immediately, visitors will be amazed at the amount of work in the sculptures - clearly, the installation is time and energy consuming to put together with threads woven, tied, knotted, strung and entwined to fill the entire room. The threads create a dense, cloud of red, woven together, clinging to walls, sprouting up and around the space. It is as if the web is still in process, still growing, the traces of a creature who continues to work, invisible. For Shiota, the threads are evidence of her existence, her weaving of ideas, of relationships, of memories of the spaces she has traversed. Thus, for Shiota, that creature fabricating this web is us humans, and the work represents the "uncertain journey" of life as we sail around the spaces of our existence. The skeletal boat hulls, as if burnt remnants of some kind of apocalypse, appear to sprout the red woven yarn, like clouds of vapour filling the ten foot high space. At the same time, it is as if they threads are being guided by the boat hulls, pulled on their way to another land.

Chiharu Shiota, Inside-Outside, 2008-2024

The marriage of opposites—objects and installations that can be seen as depictions of creativity and destruction, life and death, possibility and entrapment—is the signature concern of Shiota's work. In Inside-Outside, for example, window frames collected from construction sites for the  rebuilding of former East Berlin in the early 2000s, climb skyward, one on top of the other, sometimes doubled by more windows, into a wall that separates inside from outside. It's impossible to know if one is on the inside or the outside of this wall of windows, what is excluded, what is contained, where one is standing. And even though we are walled in by windows, we know there is an other side. We cannot always see through the windows, or if we do, the image on the other side is blurred, or fragmented so that looking at the window becomes more satisfying than what is on the other side. Such was life in the former East Berlin. Some of the windows are broken, some frames have no windows at all, others are boarded up, the function of what we know as a window has become a thing of the past. None of the windows are open, all are old, deteriorated, more objects to look at than gateways to another world. And so, Shiota transforms the meaning of what we know a window to be.

Chiharu Shiota, In Silence, 2004

Thanks to Shiota's residence in Germany, it's difficult not to think of the Holocaust when wandering through the exhibition. Particularly because she uses the objects that are often found in Holocaust art representations. Old shoes and clothes are scattered throughout the exhibition spaces. And inside (or outside) the windows of Inside—Outside we are reminded of all those windows that don't open. The windows of Auschwitz block 8 that were permanently shuttered in order that the occupants would not see the killings taking place on the other side. Or those windows with their recognizeable frames on the barracks at Auschwitz, rendering life opaque and inevitable for their occupants.

Chiharu Shiota, Accumulation - Searching for the Destination, 2014/2024

In perhaps the most imposing, yet precarious of the eight installations that comprise The Soul Trembles Accumulation - Searching for the Destination sees Shiota put another symbol of the Holocaust to unique use. Old suitcases are suspended form red cords, cluttered together, slowly rising to the heavens. The stairway to heaven is said to be holding memories, experiences, but given their prominence in Holocaust art, we look at Shiota's suitcases and see the dispossessed. The suitcase is not only for those who move around by choice, but those whose lives have been confiscated, their destiny in a suitcase removed forever. I think of how much is held within the suitcase. When we travel, we are separated from our suitcases, they contain everything we need for the time that we are away from home, and yet, we willingly let go of them as we step on a plane. The suitcase, like old shoes, clothes, a burnt out piano, chairs without seats is, all at once, about motion and possiblity of what lies ahead, about new horizons. And in its association with the Holocaust, it is also about death, stagnation, stasis. 

Chiharu Shiota, Accumulation - Searching for the Destination, 2014/2024

Depending on which end we begin our exploration of Accumulation, the suitcases might also be a stairway from heaven to ground, gravity pulling us to a firm place, our own place on earth, thus, fixity. The suitcase comes with us from one world to the next, it is a vessel for all that we want to do in the future, and simultaneously, a memory of the past. For Shiota, the past and future are connected, unsurprisingly, with red thread, the blood running through one generation to the next.