Expanding its inquiry into gesture, material, and metamorphosis, Nahmad Contemporary shifted its lens to the intertwined realms of space and memory in 2015. Ideas of distance and duration threaded through the year’s exhibitions, which considered how images occupy the cultural imagination and how surfaces retain the traces of touch and time.
The program opened with Richard Prince: Fashion, a meditation on desire and mediation that recast the codes of advertising into art. It continued with Joan Miró: Oiseaux dans l’Espace, a survey of late masterworks that traced the artist’s renewed freedom and spatial lyricism. Finally, Rudolf Stingel: 2000–2003 closed the year with an exploration of surface and authorship, where destruction and participation became acts of remembrance and creation.
Together, these exhibitions revealed a curatorial vision rooted in concepts of transformation and reflection: how images shift meaning across time and how art translates experience into form. Prince’s rephotographed models, Miró’s expansive ideograms, and Stingel’s materially transformed and distressed surfaces each redefined what image-making could be in their respective eras.
Through these dialogues, Nahmad Contemporary continued to situate itself as a place where the boundaries between historical and contemporary, abstraction and figuration, object and idea, are constantly reconsidered.
As we look toward the gallery’s next chapter, in the coming months, we will continue to reframe and reflect on Nahmad Contemporary’s 12-year journey.
RICHARD PRINCE: FASHION
2 March–18 April 2015
Richard Prince: Fashion marked the artist’s second solo exhibition at the gallery and the first to reunite all nine works from his seminal Fashion series (1982–84). At a moment when the ability to appropriate media was rapidly expanding through new technologies — from VHS recording to the early sampling of hip-hop — Prince turned to the glossy pages of magazine advertising. He rephotographed what he called “authorless” images to expose their strategic seduction and the structures of consumer desire. Cropped, enlarged, and stripped of logos or text, these images hover between allure and alienation.
Prince’s rephotographs of idealized models with closely cropped faces and averted gazes unsettle the boundaries between the commercial and the personal, the seductive and the subversive. By reframing advertising as fine art, he illuminated the fictions embedded in both realms. As critic Hal Foster wrote, Prince sought to “catch seduction in the act,” revealing how identity, gender, and power circulate through images of beauty. In the Fashion works, the camera becomes both mirror and scalpel: a tool for dissecting cultural desire. Four decades later, their glossy surfaces and mediated intimacy remain uncannily prescient, anticipating an era defined by self-curation and the endless reproduction of the image.
JOAN MIRÓ: OISEAUX DANS L’ESPACE
30 April–18 July 2015
Illuminating a late chapter of the artist’s extraordinary career, Joan Miró: Oiseaux dans l’Espace presented masterworks from the 1960s and ’70s that trace Miró’s renewed freedom and experimentation in the wake of American abstraction. Long celebrated for transforming painting into a poetic field of symbols, Miró’s late canvases reveal an artist liberated by the vitality of the postwar avant-garde he helped inspire. His encounters with New York’s Abstract Expressionists — Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, and Willem de Kooning among them — reanimated his own practice, resulting in a more fluid mark and more expansive compositions.
Miró’s response to these young Americans translated into an exuberant gestural energy that intensified following his final visit to the United States in 1968. “It showed me the liberties we can take, and how far we could go, beyond the limits,” he reflected. “In a sense, it freed me.” This newfound freedom merged the sophisticated lyricism of his European roots with the unrestrained optimism of the American avant-garde. In these luminous late works, gesture becomes both subject and structure: an expressive language through which Miró achieved a rare balance between material immediacy and poetic transcendence.
RUDOLF STINGEL: 2000–2003
6 November 2015–23 January 2016
Bringing together key works from two of Rudolf Stingel’s most radical series, his Styrofoam and Celotex panels, Rudolf Stingel: 2000–2003 demonstrated how the artist redefined painting as an event inscribed upon a surface. To create his Styrofoam paintings, Stingel walks across white panels laid on the floor wearing boots drenched in acid varnish, allowing the chemical reaction to eat into the material. The resulting footprints and eroded fragments resemble suspended, glacial forms, destabilizing conventions of materiality, authorship, and mark-making. In the Celotex installations, Stingel hands authorship to the viewer, transforming reflective insulation into a living archive of touch and time. As exhibition visitors scratch, dent, and press into the metallic panels, the surface accumulates a shifting constellation of marks, becoming a communal record of encounter and inscription.
As curator Francesco Bonami observed, Stingel’s project is “the celebration of painting as the derma, or skin, of reality.” His surfaces are not simply painted; they are lived upon — walked, marked, and scarred into being. The result is a meditation on the fragility of experience itself, and on the enduring question of what remains when image becomes surface, and surface becomes memory.