12 YEARS OF VISION AT NAHMAD CONTEMPORARY: 2014

Building on its inaugural year, 2014 saw Nahmad Contemporary expand its inquiry into how artists redefine the image — challenging the boundaries of gesture, surface, and meaning. The program opened with STRIKE(S) in February and Gangster of Love / Crushed in June, pairing Jan Frank’s gestural abstraction with John Chamberlain’s crushed-metal sculpture. Autumn followed with Still Life: Dan Flavin | Alex Israel, a luminous dialogue between the legendary Minimalist and his Los Angeles successor through two pivotal works. Together, these projects underscored the gallery’s commitment to staging conversations across generations and movements.

That spirit of dialogue carried over to the year’s landmark exhibitions. Poetics of the Gesture: Schiele, Twombly, Basquiat brought together three draftsmen for whom drawing was not a medium but an act of consciousness — a language of psychology, lyricism, and self-definition. Later, Threads of Metamorphosis: Fabric Pictures by Sigmar Polke shifted its attention to the subject of surface, revealing how material itself can both hold and disrupt meaning.

The year traced a lineage of artistic experimentation that linked gesture to material, and image to expression. Schiele, Twombly, and Basquiat revealed the mark as a record of thought, while Polke turned the canvas into a field of cultural and perceptual flux. Together, their works affirmed the gallery’s enduring focus on transformation — on art as a site where meaning remains fluid, alive, and open to continual reinvention.

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.

POETICS OF THE GESTURE: SCHIELE, TWOMBLY, BASQUIAT
2 May–14 June 2014

Schiele, Twombly, and Basquiat are artists for whom drawing was not merely a medium but an existential act. Their works, shown together for the first time, traced a century-long continuum in which line becomes both language and revelation. As the exhibition’s curator Dr. Dieter Buchhart observed, “Basquiat’s passion for drawing was something he had in common with artists such as Egon Schiele and Cy Twombly in particular. All three exceptional artists not only developed their own idiosyncratic, unique style of drawing, but their artistic practice was also defined by it.”

Comprising nearly 40 works on paper, the exhibition revealed how each artist transformed gesture into a vehicle for expression — from Schiele’s early 1910s portraits to Basquiat’s 1980s oilstick drawings. “While Twombly’s influence on Basquiat has already been the subject of discussion several times,” noted Buchhart, “his relationship to Schiele’s drawings is less immediately apparent,” adding that Basquiat was nonetheless aware of the Viennese artist’s work.

For Schiele, gesture was psychological — his taut contours and fevered touch turned the human form inside out, as seen in Gerti in Orange Hat (1910) and Mann und Frau (Umarmung) (Man and Woman [Embrace])(1917). Twombly approached it lyrically, translating memory and myth into looping script. In an Untitled work from 1969, structure dissolves into motion and the mark becomes both trace and thought. Basquiat’s gesture was both rhythmic and rhetorical, a torrent of marks through which identity, language, and history collided. His drawings, including Untitled (Head of a Madman) (1982) and Untitled (Figure JMB #1) (1982), reanimate that expressionist intensity, merging figuration, abstraction, text, and symbol into an idiom of raw, coded energy.

Across generations, these artists “expanded the art concept from consonance to dissonance,” in Buchhart’s words, enabling “a process of liberation with often minimal means.” Poetics of the Gesture revealed how mark-making itself can embody the tension between control and release, fragility and force, past and present.

THREADS OF METAMORPHOSIS: FABRIC PICTURES BY SIGMAR POLKE
12 September–1 November 2014

Sigmar Polke built a career on irreverence, shifting fluidly between media to expose how images shape and deceive perception. His so-called fabric pictures, begun in the 1960s, used printed textiles — patterned curtains, synthetic weaves, and domestic fabrics — in place of the conventional painter’s canvas, transforming the everyday into a site of painterly and philosophical inquiry. As critic Raphael Rubinstein describes in the exhibition’s catalogue, a “fabric painting” arises when the pictorial support itself becomes “an active, necessary component of the work,” its patterns, threads, and traces of prior use refusing to recede into neutrality.

Featuring works from the 1980s through the early 2000s, the exhibition demonstrated how Polke expanded painting into a field of cultural and historical synthesis. Works such as Roter Fisch (Red Fish) (1992) and Der Rabe (The Raven) (1996) layer printed fabrics with fluid fields of paint, collapsing material pattern and painterly gesture into a single plane of visual play. In later compositions, Polke introduced chemically treated materials that shift with temperature and time, morphing perception into a live event. Through this plurality of sources and techniques, Polke wove together fragmented moments, reordering imagery from art history, popular culture, and science to form a visual metaphor for the complexity of modern experience.

At the core of Polke’s practice was the conviction that nothing, in art or life, sustains absolute meaning — a belief echoed in Rubinstein’s observation that “the empty white canvas is every bit as artificial and as saturated with ideological assumptions as the white cube exhibition space.” He added that “replacing the blank canvas with a fabric support that bears evidence of a previous history and specific cultural associations immediately problematizes all notions of authenticity and autonomy.” Threads of Metamorphosis made that artifice visible. By substituting the modernist blank canvas with printed fabric, Polke exposed the instability of perception — how meaning shifts depending on context, pattern, and gaze. In his hands, painting became a site of endless negotiation, one that captures the ambiguity of reality and mirrors the fluidity of contemporary thought.