Approaching authority not as a fixed force but as a field of negotiation, Nahmad Contemporary’s 2021 program explored how artists test, disrupt, and remake inherited systems. Across the year, familiar structures — games, gestures, objects, and artistic conventions — became tools of investigation and reinvention. From the charged material intelligence of David Hammons to the enduring formal exchange between Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, the year’s central exhibitions traced power in motion: exposed through transformation, asserted through gesture, and reimagined through form.
That inquiry extended through the centenary survey of Georges Mathieu, which reconsidered the French artist’s role in postwar abstraction. Long defined by speed, gesture, and public performance, Mathieu positioned painting as an event: a bodily assertion made directly on the canvas. His work offered another model of artistic intensity — one grounded in movement, immediacy, and the force of the mark.
These presentations considered how artists work within established languages and ideas without simply submitting to them. Hammons transformed everyday materials into instruments of cultural pressure; Mathieu turned gesture into assertion; and Braque and Picasso revealed how even modernism’s most foundational exchanges could remain open to revision.
As the gallery enters its next chapter, we will continue to reflect on and reframe Nahmad Contemporary’s 12-year journey.
DAVID HAMMONS: BASKETBALL & KOOL-AID
1 May–24 July 2021
David Hammons: Basketball & Kool-Aid brought into focus a body of work in which Hammons transfigures ordinary objects and gestures into sites of cultural critique, exposing the structures that shape value, visibility, and identity through delicate abstract compositions.
Across the Basketball drawings (1995–2012), he replaces the artist’s hand with the bounce of a ball, often coated in dirt from Harlem. Each mark records an action governed by chance, but also conditioned by the social and economic narratives attached to the sport. Long framed as a pathway to mobility within Black American culture, basketball here becomes both medium and metaphor — its promise of transcendence rendered unstable, contingent, and volatile.
The Kool-Aid works (2003–07) extend that logic into the language of painting itself. Hammons applies the powdered drink in saturated veils of color that recall postwar abstraction while quietly undoing its claims of purity and autonomy. Kool-Aid brings with it a charged set of associations: childhood, consumption, sweetness, affordability, racial stereotypes, and the darker implications of collective belief embedded in the phrase “drinking the Kool-Aid.” In place of rarefied materials, Hammons uses a substance already loaded with cultural meaning, exposing the hierarchies that structure artistic and social value. Acts of concealment — silk coverings, wrapped frames — further complicate access, interrupting the viewer’s ability to fully grasp or consume the image. Throughout both series, sport, painting, and consumer culture are made to disclose their own codes, as ordinary materials become inflected with histories of race, value, and visibility.
BRAQUE | PICASSO
5 November 2021–15 January 2022
Braque | Picasso revisited one of modernism’s foundational partnerships to examine how artistic authority remains open to revision. Rather than return to the invention of Cubism as a closed historical achievement, the exhibition traced its afterlife through two works made long after its most famous chapter had ended: Picasso’s Pichet et Coupe de Fruits (1931) and Braque’s Nu Couché (1935). Created more than 15 years after Braque and Picasso’s legendary collaboration between 1907 and 1914, the paintings suggest that the visual language they forged together continued to shape both artists’ mid-career work in subtler, more independent forms.
Across the two canvases, distinctions between still life and figure, object and body begin to dissolve. In Picasso’s composition, the tabletop arrangement assumes a bodily charge, its undulating tablecloth echoing the biomorphic sweep of Braque’s reclining nude, which is absorbed into a patterned interior and built through a comparable rhythm of line and contour. Both large-scale horizontal compositions are anchored by concentrated accents of color — red in Picasso, yellow in Braque — and move beyond the fractured geometry of early Cubism toward a more elastic, sensual syntax, maintaining the logic of deconstruction while opening it to new expressive possibilities.
In this context, formal exchange becomes a way of testing authority from within. Braque and Picasso were not only heirs to modernism’s language; they had helped create it. By returning to that language in altered form, the exhibition showed how even the most canonical artistic systems remain dynamic, not as fixed inheritances, but as structures still open to pressure and revision.