The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth presents David-Jeremiah: The Fire This Time, organized by Guest Curator Christopher Blay. August 16, 2025 - November 2, 2025 The body of work on view in this exhibition is a group of vertical assemblages of black and other polychromatic paintings on shaped wood that form an installation. The twenty-eight works stand over ten feet tall. This primary configuration surrounds viewers completely. Fire is a major motif in David-Jeremiah’s work. Figuratively, fire is the crucible through which the artist has passed. For his practice, David-Jeremiah conceived of binders full of work, operating in a conceptual space that defies any self-imposed rules made from the comfort of most artists’ studios. Birthing new modes of self-reflective determination and urgency, David-Jeremiah brings the fire this time, incinerating what has come before to propose something new. His maximalist approach to art-making feeds the flames and its towering paintings. This is a purifying, refining fire—a disruptive, controlled burn that course-corrects the trajectory of conceptualism. It is fire. In his artistic practice, David-Jeremiah engages with the ritualistic context of fire and flame. Whether it is in his 2019 painting Hamborghini Rally: Soul Hunt City (‘68 Semipro), or the last in the series of his I Drive Thee tondo paintings manifesting its soul over the flames of an incinerator for a succession of urns in L’Anima, 2023 (part of his 2024‒25 exhibition at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts), the flames are there. In the presentation at the Modern, his paintings-as-figures bask in the glow of embers that we, the viewers, create. David-Jeremiah’s work resides at the edge of the fire, and we see our faces and selves reflected back in the flickering flames. Publisher: Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (August, 2025)
