Figures without Names is an exhibition of paintings by the late artist Franne Davids. In her basement studio for nearly four decades, Davids built up layer upon layer of oil paint across forty-two canvases and hundreds of works on paper. Diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia in the late 1970s, she painted largely unseen, rejected by institutions including MoMA, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. Her canvases, thick with layers of countless paintings underneath and populated almost entirely by women, defy chronology and resist conclusion.
