Franne Davids

Frances Beth Davids was born in Connecticut on December 17, 1950. After a turbulent young adulthood marked by psychotic breaks, she was formally diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia in the late 1970s and moved back to her parents' house in Waterbury, Connecticut, where she would spend the rest of her life. The family basement became her studio, and she immersed herself in painting, working in near-total isolation and absorbing the history of modern painting , Matisse, the Fauves, Soutine, and Ensor,  entirely on her own terms. At her death in 2022 she left behind forty-two large canvases and several hundred works on paper.

Her canvases bear nearly four decades of layered, re-applied oil paint, making individual works impossible to date. Her painted world was populated almost exclusively by women — repeating characters that may have served as interlocutors as much as surrogate selves. Her family believes her hallucinations were largely auditory, and that the women in her paintings were part of that inner life: "She would talk to them; she had relationships with them."

Writing in Artforum, Barry Schwabsky noted that she would sometimes make her way to New York, "where she was sure the Museum of Modern Art was hoarding paintings it had stolen from her. I wouldn't be surprised if they turn up there someday, legitimately acquired." Her estate is now co-represented by Ricco/Maresca and Sebastian Gladstone.