12 YEARS OF VISION AT NAHMAD CONTEMPORARY: 2017

In 2017, Nahmad Contemporary turned its focus toward abstraction not as a style but as a process — a continual negotiation between material, image, and thought. Across the year’s program, artists approached painting as an arena of investigation, where gesture, surface, and constraint became tools for probing how meaning is constructed and undone. From the raw physicality of Antoni Tàpies to the conceptual provocations of Albert Oehlen, abstraction emerged as an active field of inquiry rather than a settled language.

That inquiry was first articulated with the opening of Jan Frank: Paintings in January, a survey that demonstrated how the artist’s use of drawing, projection, and citation could be folded into painterly gesture. Frank’s practice, shaped by the legacies of Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock but filtered through postmodern strategies of appropriation, trace, and erasure, offered a vision of abstraction as a layered dialogue between spontaneity and control. In May, the gallery presented Monochrome: A Dialogue Between Burri, Fontana, Klein, Manzoni, and Stingel. The exhibition framed chromatic reduction as a means of distilling painting to its conceptual and material core — from Yves Klein’s signature blue canvases to Lucio Fontana’s emblematic Concetto Spaziale and Piero Manzoni’s colorless Achromes. Whether pursued for its metaphysical resonance or its emphasis on matter itself, the monochrome stood as a reminder that limitation can be a powerful catalyst for invention.

Together, these exhibitions set the stage for the year’s two defining statements. Tàpies’s densely worked surfaces and Oehlen’s rigorously constrained gray paintings each confronted abstraction as something to be built, tested, and even resisted. In different ways, both artists transformed restriction into possibility, revealing how the act of making — rather than the image alone — can become the true subject of painting.

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.

TÀPIES: PAINTINGS: 1970-2003
20 March–22 April 2017

Across the final decades of his career, Tàpies transformed abstraction into a form of material meditation. Rather than treating the canvas as a neutral ground for image-making, he approached it as a site of physical and metaphysical study — a surface to be worked, scarred, built up, and worn down. The paintings gathered in Tàpies: Paintings, 1970–2003 present abstraction not as a retreat from the world, but as a way of meeting it through matter itself.

Tàpies developed a practice that fused the raw materiality of Art Informel with the psychic charge of Surrealism. By the 1970s, that conviction had coalesced into a language of austere, tactile abstraction, built from cardboard, cloth, wire, wood, and other found materials chosen for the social histories and everyday associations with labor and domestic life.

The rough, layered grounds allowed Tàpies to construct a form of painting that hovered between image and object. Religious symbols, scrawled marks, earthen pigments, and found elements emerge and recede across the surfaces, evoking a kind of modern monasticism — a search for transcendence enacted through humble means — while also unsettling the boundary between representation and reality. Techniques such as grattage link his work to Surrealism, and the weight and texture of his materials align him with European postwar contemporaries who challenged the conventions of painterly purity. In this way, Tàpies expanded abstraction into a form of philosophical inquiry, one that treats matter as both substance and symbol.

From today’s vantage point, these works also foreshadow the material-driven practices of later generations, from the Neo-Expressionists to contemporary artists who continue to elevate the provisional, the broken, and the handmade. In tracing Tàpies’s commitment to abstraction as a lived, physical process, the exhibition positioned him as a vital precursor to the ways artists now think about surface and meaning.

ALBERT OEHLEN: GRAU
7 November–23 December 2017

Oehlen’s gray paintings distill abstraction to its most reduced conditions — gesture, tone, and surface — bringing painting into direct contact with its material and pictorial core. Created between 1997 and 2008, the works in Albert Oehlen: Grau were presented at Nahmad Contemporary for the first time in an intimate examination of a pivotal series by an artist known for pushing painting across a wide range of styles and formal languages. Within this period of chromatic restraint, Oehlen sharpened his attention to his chosen medium and the formal act of mark-making, allowing abstraction to unfold as a process of testing rather than a fixed visual identity.

Stripped of color, the gray works operate in a register of visual ambiguity. Soft atmospheres, layered passages, and looping strokes create shifting fields from which fragments of figures, objects, and interiors intermittently surface. These fleeting recognitions never fully settle into representation, leaving the viewer suspended between reading and seeing. Oehlen approached the series through self-imposed limits, using the muted range of gray as a form of productive restraint. As the artist explained, the chromatic restriction was a type of “therapy” intended to heighten desire for color by temporarily withholding it. What emerges instead is abstraction experienced as an embodied, performative act.

The gray paintings also engage art history with characteristic irreverence. Their title and palette recall Gerhard Richter’s celebrated Graue Bilder, yet Oehlen’s loose, unruly execution transforms homage into provocation. Where Richter pursued analytical distance, Oehlen embraces painterly excess, allowing reference and parody to coexist within the same surface.

In these works, abstraction becomes a field of perpetual testing — of form against formlessness, intention against accident, reverence against subversion. Positioned at the close of Nahmad Contemporary’s 2017 program, Grau offered a bracing counterpoint to Tàpies’s material spirituality, reaffirming abstraction not as a settled language but as an ongoing experiment in how painting thinks.