When artists take up language, pattern, and process as raw material in their work rather than regarding them as secondary concerns, new forms of meaning begin to emerge. The artists featured in Nahmad Contemporary’s 2016 program embraced that shift, inviting viewers to explore how visual lexicons evolve, how repetition becomes generative, and how the rules of authorship can be subtly but decisively rewritten through the act of creation.
Opening the year, Les Fleurs du Mal offered an alternative genealogy of Modernism, tracing the influence of Gustave Moreau’s secular, psychologically rich reinterpretations of mythology and scripture, which helped shape the symbolic and emotional vocabularies of 20th-century art. In the fall, Warhol, Wool, Guyton turned to technological and mechanical procedures — from silkscreen to digital editing — revealing how repetition and reproduction can loosen the grip of authorship and give rise to new artistic possibilities. Together, these exhibitions demonstrated that meaning shifts when the familiar codes of image-making are reoriented, whether through symbolic transformation or mechanical procedure.
These ideas came into sharper focus through the year’s two landmark exhibitions: Words Are All We Have: Paintings by Jean-Michel Basquiat and Daniel Buren’s Origin of Stripes: Paintings from 1965–1966. Though wildly different in sensibility, both artists developed distinct approaches to visual communication, built from vernacular fragments, rhythms, and serialized or borrowed forms. Basquiat deployed words and marks found in popular culture as charged agents that complicate authorship and turn repetition into meaning; Buren relied on the disciplined clarity of his patterned stripes, ultimately stripping away all traces of his hand to let structure shape the viewer’s experience. Together, their approaches underscored the year’s central idea: that the building blocks of communication — whether verbal, visual, or procedural — can serve as material, opening new ways of seeing and interpreting art.
As the gallery enters its next chapter, over the coming months, we will continue to reflect on and reframe Nahmad Contemporary’s 12-year journey.
WORDS ARE ALL WE HAVE: PAINTINGS BY JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT
2 May–18 June 2016
Words Are All We Have foregrounded the material force of language at the core of Basquiat’s practice. Curated by Dr. Dieter Buchhart, the exhibition assembled works in which words, symbols, and drawn forms operate less as descriptive details than as abstract statements of the painting's conceptual program. Language becomes something Basquiat cuts apart, repeats, crosses out, and rebuilds, an active field where meaning is generated rather than fixed.
Across the exhibition, words behaved like charged elements: compressed into lists, looped like rhythmic phrases, or set into collision with drawn figures and pictograms. These maneuvers reflect Basquiat’s deep engagement with the cultural and creative logics that shaped him — from William Burroughs’s “cut-up” prose to the samplings of early hip-hop and the improvisational cadences of jazz. As Buchhart observed in the exhibition’s catalogue, language permeated Basquiat’s practice throughout his career, serving as a way to absorb the world and recast its histories.
Authenticity, for Basquiat, was never singular. He borrowed words and images from everywhere, repeating, erasing, and reworking them until they carried his imprint. Even the exposed stretcher bars and raw supports act as part of this vocabulary, revealing the painting’s construction, while laying bare the processes through which meanings are produced and given currency. What emerges is a practice where language, image, and structure are indivisible, each powering the restless engine of his art.
DANIEL BUREN’S ORIGIN OF STRIPES: PAINTINGS FROM 1965–1966
15 September–22 October 2016
Origin of Stripes: Paintings from 1965–1966 foregrounded the structural force of the stripe at the center of Buren’s early practice. The exhibition gathered 10 formative works in which the artist tested, and ultimately committed to, the standardized 8.7-centimeter band that would come to define his visual language. In these paintings, the stripe operates less as a motif than as the organizing scaffold of the work itself, an unremitting unit through which questions of perception, authorship, and neutrality are rerouted.
Throughout the exhibition, the stripe behaved like a clarifying element: first hand-painted and edged by irregular washes of color, then gradually replaced by a mass-produced fabric whose crisp regularity exceeded anything the hand could achieve. For Buren, this shift marked a decisive turn. The prefab material offered a surface in which the artist’s gesture could fall away, allowing the work’s structure — not the painter’s subjectivity — to anchor the viewer’s experience. Repetition becomes generative here, not ornamental; each stripe resets the field, sharpening attention to the painting’s limits, its context, and the viewer’s position before it.
Illuminated here as a cornerstone of his practice, this group of works captures a moment when a traditional medium briefly aligned with a resolutely conceptual aim. Soon after, Buren abandoned the canvas altogether, extending his stripes into site-specific installations. The motif has since transformed countless architectural surfaces while retaining its original purpose: to heighten our awareness of spatial and perceptual structures.