Post No Bills, a career-spanning survey for 89-year-old Oakland, California-based artist Raymond Saunders unfolds in two grand white gallery spaces of David Zwirner and Andrew Kreps. The installations beautifully showcase major mixed-media assemblages and paintings on canvas with sociopolitical undertones from 1968 to 2007. To know that the artist, who has dementia, may not be fully aware of this show, adds a feeling of melancholy to the two-part exhibition given the works’ great emphasis on memory and the passage of time. Throughout the show, an array of symbols appear—personal, cultural and religious; they underscore the fragility of life’s ephemera, and the solitude of an interior existence that can never be fully understood by another.

Most of the works are roughly covered in black tar-like paint, with splotches of bright emergency-tape yellow and other strong primary colors, overlaid with an amalgam of cutouts from newspapers, postcards, wallpaper samples, and wooden objects. Some compositions feature chalk-like outlines of figures, scribbled lines, scrunches of tape, ribbons, and spray painted here and there with drips and blotches. Two large paintings—Drawing a Still Life (1987) or Untitled (1996), over 6 by 5 feet, and 8 by 4 feet, respectively—impart the complexity of Saunders’s thinking—encompassing a personal expression of the African American experience. Street-smart and hyper-energetic, the works force a consideration of others’ lives. In his hands, common, found objects, ostensibly random markings, shapes, colors, and mundane images become talismanic, and deeply moving.