Installation views, Hans Hartung, Nahmad Contemporary, 12 January–17 March 2018; (UN)COVERED): Miró | Hammons, Nahmad Contemporary, 12 September–17 November 2018. Photographs by Tom Powel Imaging.
Coinciding with its fifth anniversary, Nahmad Contemporary’s 2018 program reaffirmed the gallery’s guiding principles while continuing to advance them into new conceptual terrain. The year’s exhibitions extended an ongoing commitment to historically significant artists whose practices have altered the course of artistic production, while also emphasizing transformation as a defining condition of creation. Across the program, unconventional materials, tools, and strategies were treated not as departures from tradition, but as means of rethinking how form, meaning, and authorship come into being.
This ethos was articulated in Five Years at Nahmad Contemporary, an anniversary exhibition that brought together works by artists central to the gallery’s vision, including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Richard Prince, Sigmar Polke, and Andy Warhol, among others. That spirit of reflection and expansion carried through the year’s focused exhibitions. A solo presentation of Hans Hartung’s work opened the year, revealing a form of abstraction forged through discipline as much as gesture, where apparent disorder was governed by precise systems of control. Later in the year, (UN)COVERED: Miró | Hammons examined how material subversion operates as a generative act across generations of artists, challenging the conventions of painting and its hierarchies.
Together, these exhibitions framed 2018 as a moment of continuity and renewal — a year in which the gallery’s founding ideas were not only rearticulated but actively transformed. 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.
HANS HARTUNG
12 January–17 March 2018
Across more than four decades of work, Hartung pursued abstraction as a rigorously structured practice in movement, experimentation, and control. The 2018 exhibition at Nahmad Contemporary — the artist’s first solo presentation in New York since 1975 — surveyed this sustained investigation, bringing together works from the 1950s through the final years of his life. What emerged within the exhibition was a practice that reconciled the appearance of gestural freedom with an underlying discipline rooted in methodical precision.
Hartung’s paintings are often read through the lens of postwar expressionism, their dynamic marks taken as direct expressions of psychological intensity. Yet the exhibition revealed a more complex process at work. Throughout the 1950s, he carefully derived many of his seemingly spontaneous strokes from preexisting drawings and watercolors, enlarging and transferring them using stencils. His gesture, in this context, was not impulsive but constructed — the result of his deliberate planning and command over his medium.
From the 1960s onward, Hartung expanded his vocabulary through unconventional tools and techniques, using compressed-air spray guns, rakes, and tree branches to generate dense fields of movement across his canvases. These implements introduced physical force and unpredictability into the act of painting, yet he governed their effects with remarkable restraint. Scraped, sprayed, and thrashed surfaces resolve into compositions that balance aggression with order, revealing an artist committed to organizing chaos rather than surrendering to it.
Even after a debilitating stroke in 1986 limited his mobility, Hartung continued to work with unwavering precision, adapting his methods without relinquishing his formal ambitions. The exhibition framed his legacy as one defined not by expressive excess alone, but by an enduring belief in abstraction as a system — an alchemy through which disorder is transformed into structure, and freedom is achieved through discipline.
(UN)COVERED: MIRÓ | HAMMONS
12 September–17 November 2018
(UN)COVERED: Miró | Hammons brought together two artists separated by generation and geography, yet united by their shared commitment to unsettling the conventions of painting. Pairing Joan Miró’s radical Sobreteixims from the early 1970s with David Hammons’s tarp-covered canvases from the 2000s, the exhibition traced parallel modes of concealment and exposure, examining how acts of uncovering alternative materials and covering conventional aesthetics functioned as generative strategies.
Miró’s Sobreteixims, produced late in his career while living in exile in Mallorca, marked a decisive break from traditional pictorial structure. Constructed from found fabrics — burlap sacks, coarse textiles, and industrial supports — the works took shape through deconstructive and restorative acts: puncturing and patching, burning and extinguishing.
Miró treated these materials not as neutral grounds but as active participants, collapsing the hierarchy between support and image. Objects used in the making process were often embedded directly into the works, transforming the surface into a record of action and dismantling the notion of the singular artistic gesture.
Hammons’s tarp paintings enact a related disruption through concealment. By shrouding painted canvases beneath frayed industrial fabrics gathered from the street, Hammons denies the viewer full access to the conventional pictorial field. Only fragments of the paint are visible through rips and folds, repositioning what is traditionally hidden as the primary site of meaning. In doing so, Hammons challenges the sanctity of the painted surface while critiquing the cultural and institutional frameworks that govern what is valued, displayed, and preserved.
Presented together, Miró and Hammons revealed a shared commitment to undoing the visual and ideological expectations of painting. Through acts of covering and uncovering, destruction and repair, both artists transformed unconventional materials into vehicles for resistance — affirming alchemy not as metaphor, but as method.