Imagine walking into a campsite. The stars are shining, the wind is warm. But instead of singing around the fire with friends and family, you are the fire. The heat and light at the center of it all.
This is the experience to which Dallas-based artist David-Jeremiah invites visitors in his new solo exhibition, The Fire This Time, at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. The gallery gathers 27 shaped paintings created between 2020 and 2024 that transform viewers into part of the artwork.
“This exhibition is a road into the thinking of a contemporary artist,” said curator Christopher Blay.
The exhibition spans four rooms. In the main room, visitors encounter towering black wood panels nearly 10 feet tall. The paintings are arranged in clusters, circling like a firepit. Step into the center and suddenly you’re the flame, the focal point that animates the pieces.
David-Jeremiah calls it an “inverted performance installation” where the paintings observe the guest instead of the other way around.
“[It’s] about making something more than you the way you want it to be for longer than you’re able to,” David-Jeremiah said.
At the heart of the show are Lamborghinis. Each painting takes the shape of the Italian car’s hood. As a child, David-Jeremiah was captivated by the luxury cars named after Spanish fighting bulls. As an adult, he began exploring the tension of how the sleek machine embodies both beauty and violence. It became a metaphor for human nature and identity.
The exhibition's title references James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, which wrestles with the struggles of Black masculinity in America. For David-Jeremiah, fire itself is a recurring theme acting as an ancient, primal element that represents destruction, transformation and redemption.
The paintings shift from pure black to exuding strings of vivid color derived from different Lamborghini models, mimicking the glow of an active fire. Their surfaces are layered, scraped and even burned away the deeper into the gallery guests move. One piece sheds gray paint like cooling ash, while another is entirely covered in red erupting with the brightness of fire at full blaze. The progression suggests both the life cycle of flames and the layered experience of identity.
Blay says David-Jeremiah also draws from James Baldwin's 1971 conversation with the late poet Nikki Giovanni, which explored race, love and survival under white supremacy.
“For David-Jeremiah, going through the fire means experiencing these things in the most honest and real ways in order to get to the healing that everyone talks about and no one does anything about,” Blay said.
The exhibition also resonates with works from the Modern’s permanent collection. The first room features a John Chamberlain sculpture made of twisted car parts that echoes David-Jeremiah’s use of Lamborghini hoods. Anselm Kiefer’s Quaternity, with its burning flames contained in a pentagram, mirrors the artist’s use of fire and geometric form as symbols of transformation. And a classic Mark Rothko painting recalls the spiritual weight of Rothko’s Houston chapel, an echo of David-Jeremiah’s own use of geometry.
Dustin Van Orne, the museum’s manager of strategic marketing and visitors’ service, said the exhibition reflects how contemporary art can spark curiosity both locally and globally – something the museum is always looking for.
“It's immersive. It's one of those kinds of exhibitions that you have to be in to see. The work. The installation, the way that the work envelops you, it's just such a remarkable space,” Van Orne said.
The Fire This Time is on view at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth through Nov. 2.
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