Across a year marked by rupture and uncertainty, defined by pandemic-era isolation, social unrest, and rapidly shifting political and cultural landscapes, Nahmad Contemporary focused its 2020 program on dialogue as both structure and strategy. Bringing artists into conversation across generations, geographies, and modes of production, the exhibitions resisted fixed positions in favor of contingency, exchange, and reinterpretation.
Rather than positioning works as autonomous objects, the program foregrounded the relationships through which meaning can be reconfigured: dialogues between artists and their materials, between historical precedents and contemporary practices, and between authorship and the systems that frame it. Painting, installation, and living ecosystems alike became sites through which perception and understanding are continuously negotiated within shifting contexts.
The year unfolded through three distinct yet resonant presentations: Daniel Buren | Pierre Huyghe, SUPERUNKNOWN | Max Ernst & Yves Tanguy with Urs Fischer, and Richard Prince: Cartoon Jokes. Together, they frame a program in which exchange — across time, media, and authorship — operates not only as a curatorial device, but also as an artistic condition in its own right.
As the gallery enters its next chapter, we will continue to reflect on and reframe Nahmad Contemporary’s 12-year journey.
DANIEL BUREN | PIERRE HUYGHE
11 February–4 April 2020
Daniel Buren | Pierre Huyghe brought into dialogue two artists who, across generations, have consistently redefined the conditions under which art is produced and encountered. Emerging in the mid-1960s, Daniel Buren developed his now-iconic striped motif as a means of stripping painting of illusion and expression, redirecting attention toward its site of display — a concern that finds a distinct continuation in Pierre Huyghe’s later exploration of dynamic, self-evolving ecosystems. By adopting standardized awning fabric, marked by its 8.7-centimeter-wide stripes, Buren reduced the artist’s hand to a minimum, positioning the work as a neutral structure whose meaning is contingent upon context.
Presented alongside Buren’s earlier works, Huyghe’s Cambrian Explosion (2013) extends this logic into the realm of living systems. Comprising a self-regulating aquarium in which aquatic organisms and mineral elements interact beyond the artist’s control, the work unfolds as an evolving environment rather than a fixed object. A suspended boulder hovers above crabs and anemones, suggesting a state of continual emergence and transformation.
While formally distinct, both practices decenter the artist as author. Whether through industrial repetition or biological autonomy, Buren and Huyghe construct situations in which meaning is not imposed but produced through shifting relationships between artwork, environment, and viewer.
SUPERUNKNOWN | MAX ERNST & YVES TANGUY WITH URS FISCHER
17 September–5 November 2020
SUPERUNKNOWN brought the visual languages of Surrealism into dialogue with a contemporary installation, placing works by Max Ernst and Yves Tanguy in direct exchange with Urs Fischer’s Gap-toothed City (2017–20). Spanning nearly a century, the exhibition collapsed historical distance, foregrounding the affinities among three artists who construct images that resist stable interpretation.
For Ernst and Tanguy, Surrealism offered a means of reconfiguring perception. Ernst’s densely worked surfaces, often developed through techniques such as frottage and grattage, translated the visible world into layered, textural ambiguity, while Tanguy’s smooth, illogical landscapes unfold as vast, indeterminate spaces populated by meticulously rendered biomorphic forms. In both, representation gives way to an uncanny, interior logic.
Fischer extends this destabilizing impulse into the present. Composed of inverted, acid-toned photographic images of New York, his floor-to-ceiling installation transformed the gallery into an estranged urban environment, where familiar structures appear dislocated and newly unfamiliar. Together, the works articulate a shared investment in unsettling perception, revealing how images — across time — can both reflect and reimagine the conditions from which they emerge.
RICHARD PRINCE | CARTOON JOKES
12 November 2020–16 January 2021
With Cartoon Jokes, Richard Prince turned to the visual language of popular media, appropriating cartoons and captions to probe the underlying structures of humor, desire, and social convention. Bringing together works from the late 1980s and early 1990s with more recent paintings from the Blue Ripples series (2017-19), the exhibition traced a practice in which meaning is produced through acts of selection, fragmentation, and recombination.
In the earlier paintings, cartoons sourced from magazines such as The New Yorker and Playboy are separated from their original captions and paired with new text, generating uneasy, often contradictory narratives. Silk-screened onto fields of saturated color, these images resist coherence, positioning the viewer within a shifting exchange between image, language, and expectation. In doing so, Prince establishes a quiet but pointed dialogue with the original creators of these images, recasting their work within a new conceptual scaffolding.
The Blue Ripples works extend this logic through processes of layering and mediation, as appropriated imagery is partially obscured beneath poured pigment and reproduced through scanning and enlargement. Across both series, the artwork emerges as a site of instability, where authorship is diffused and meaning remains open to continual revision.