Spanning nearly a century of artistic practice, Nahmad Contemporary’s 2019 program traced the evolving boundaries between gesture and reproduction, originality and appropriation, and art and the visual languages of everyday life. Across the program, painting, collage, and assemblage emerged not as fixed categories but as evolving strategies through which artists absorb the imagery of their time. Together, the exhibitions suggested the shifting lives of images themselves — how they move between studio, street, and culture at large, circulating, accumulating meaning, and ultimately returning to the artist’s hand, transformed.
The year opened with Georges Mathieu: Monumental Paintings, presenting four sweeping canvases created for the artist’s 1978 retrospective. Defined by the velocity of Mathieu’s calligraphic marks and executed at a monumental scale, the works foreground gesture as both image and event. In the spring, Jean-Michel Basquiat: Xerox examined a pivotal body of work in which the artist harnessed the Xerox machine as a compositional tool, reproducing and recombining motifs from his visual lexicon.
Elsewhere in the program, artists approached related questions through radically different materials and contexts. Kurt Schwitters: A Selection of Collages revisited the artist’s pioneering “Merz” constructions, assembling fragments of printed matter and urban detritus into compositions that collapse the boundaries between fine art and everyday materials. The group exhibition Hard Feelings brought the work of Cady Noland into dialogue with artists across generations — from Donald Judd and Andy Warhol to Christopher Wool and Wade Guyton — highlighting practices that challenge dominant cultural narratives by destabilizing established modes of artistic production. Closing the year, Albert Oehlen: Spiegelbilder presented the artist’s early “Mirror Paintings,” where reflective surfaces disrupt the pictorial field and implicate the viewer within charged social space.
These exhibitions framed 2019 as a moment of reflection within the gallery’s evolving dialogue around image-making and its histories. As the gallery enters its next chapter, we will continue over the coming months to reflect on and reframe Nahmad Contemporary’s 12-year journey.
GEORGES MATHIEU | MONUMENTAL PAINTINGS
11 January–23 February 2019
Across his career, Georges Mathieu pursued painting as an act of immediacy — one in which gesture, speed, and scale converged to produce images that record the very conditions of their making. As the central figure in the development of abstraction lyrique in postwar France, Mathieu rejected the geometric formalism that had dominated European abstraction in the interwar years. In its place, he developed a calligraphic visual language defined by sweeping lines, explosive bursts of pigment, and compositions executed with remarkable rapidity. For Mathieu, painting was not simply the construction of an image but the staging of an event.
Making their first appearance in the United States, the four monumental canvases presented in Georges Mathieu: Monumental Paintings came directly from the artist’s estate, having been created in 1978 for his landmark retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris. Each spanning more than 19 feet in width, these works — Souvenir de la maison d’Autriche, Samsum, Tuz Golu, and Zonguldak — represent the culmination of the gestural vocabulary that Mathieu had developed over several decades. Their dynamic webs of lines and vivid colors extend across their surfaces with a force that appears spontaneous, yet remains carefully orchestrated through the artist’s disciplined command of movement and timing.
Mathieu’s approach to painting was inseparable from its performative dimension. Beginning in the 1950s, he frequently executed large canvases before audiences, transforming the act of painting into a public spectacle that anticipated later developments in performance and conceptual art. Today, these monumental works reaffirm Mathieu’s role as a key interlocutor between the European and American postwar avant-gardes — helping redefine painting as both gesture and event.
JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT | XEROX
12 March–31 May 2019
Jean-Michel Basquiat: Xerox, curated by Dr. Dieter Buchhart, presented the first concentrated examination of a body of work in which the Xerox photocopier became central to the artist’s process. Bringing together more than 20 historic works alongside a selection of early Xeroxed postcards, the exhibition illuminated a practice in which reproduction functioned not as mere duplication but as a generative tool for constructing images.
Basquiat first experimented with Xerox as a medium in 1979, producing small collaged postcards with Jennifer Stein that incorporated paint splatters, scrawled text, and fragments of found material. Photocopied, mounted, and sold on the streets of New York, these early works already pointed toward an understanding of mechanical reproduction as a means of extending the circulation of images beyond the studio. By the early 1980s, the photocopier had become fully integrated into Basquiat’s practice. After acquiring his own color Xerox machine, he began reproducing drawings and motifs from his growing visual lexicon — anatomical diagrams, crowns, fragments of language — which he cut, layered, and reassembled into increasingly complex compositions.
In these works, the Xerox machine allowed Basquiat to multiply and transform his imagery, collapsing distinctions between original and copy. Repeated signs migrate across their surfaces, accumulating meaning through juxtaposition and revision. Seen together, the Xerox paintings reveal an artist attuned to the accelerating circulation of images in late 20th-century culture, positioning Basquiat as both an inheritor of collage traditions and a prescient figure anticipating the visual logic of the digital age.