At a moment when artificial intelligence, algorithms, and other emerging technologies were entering public consciousness, reshaping how information is created, shared, and understood, Nahmad Contemporary's 2022 program examined how artists respond when established conventions no longer seem adequate to the world around them. Across the year’s exhibitions, artists transformed everyday materials, embraced new digital platforms, and reimagined the possibilities of sculpture, revealing how new artistic languages emerge in periods of cultural and technological change.
Jean-Michel Basquiat: Art and Objecthood reconsidered the artist’s use of found materials and unconventional supports, bringing into focus how everyday objects can carry histories of place and identity. The Painter's New Tools turned to artists working with artificial intelligence, code, and machine-assisted processes to rethink the future of painting. Closing the year, Every Kind of Wind, Calder and the 21st Century positioned Alexander Calder’s pioneering mobiles alongside contemporary artists working across new technologies, unveiling the continued influence of his radical reimagining of sculpture.
Notably, each exhibition was shaped by a guest curator, introducing perspectives that connected historical works to contemporary concerns. Together, these presentations underscored that artistic languages rarely emerge in isolation, illustrating how new ideas take shape through the continual reexamination of inherited traditions. In doing so, they keep art responsive to an ever-changing world.
As the gallery enters its next chapter, we will continue to reflect on and reframe Nahmad Contemporary’s 12-year journey.
JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT: ART AND OBJECTHOOD
11 April–11 June 2022
Organized by renowned Basquiat scholar Dr. Dieter Buchhart, Jean-Michel Basquiat: Art and Objecthood offered a new perspective on one of the artist’s most enduring concerns: the transformative potential of ordinary things. Bringing together painted doors, windows, cabinets, chairs, and found-object sculptures, the exhibition foregrounded a body of work that has often remained secondary to Basquiat’s celebrated paintings while uncovering the central role that objects played throughout his practice.
For Basquiat, found materials were never passive supports. Drawn from the streets, apartments, and urban environments that shaped his daily life, they arrived already marked by history. Rather than erase those associations, he incorporated them into his works, allowing worn surfaces, discarded materials, and unconventional formats to retain their presence. What emerged was an artistic language that moved fluidly between painting and sculpture, private space and public life.
Within the vibrant cultural landscape of 1980s New York, Basquiat developed a practice that reflected the era’s spirit of appropriation, sampling, and experimentation while remaining deeply engaged with questions of race, power, and social inequality. More than a reconsideration of his sculptural practice, Art and Objecthood illuminated how Basquiat transformed ordinary materials into carriers of personal history and collective experience.
EVERY KIND OF WIND, CALDER AND THE 21ST CENTURY
3 November 2022–28 January 2023
Curated by Kelly Taxter in collaboration with the Calder Foundation, Every Kind of Wind, Calder and the 21st Century reconsidered Calder's enduring influence through the work of a new generation of artists. Bringing together a selection of Calder’s wire sculptures and mobiles with works by Davide Balula, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, Libby Heaney, Jakob Kudsk Steensen, and Analisa Teachworth, the exhibition traced how Calder's radical reimagining of sculpture continues to resonate nearly a century after the invention of the mobile.
Calder’s breakthrough was not simply to set sculpture in motion, but to embrace unpredictability as an essential part of the artwork itself. Responding to air currents, gravity, and the movement of those around them, his mobiles challenged the notion of sculpture as a fixed and self-contained object. Instead, they proposed a more open model of artistic experience — one shaped by change, interaction, and the conditions of the surrounding environment.
The contemporary artists featured in the exhibition extended these ideas into the 21st century through virtual reality, artificial intelligence, gaming, deep listening, and quantum computing. While working with vastly different technologies, they shared Calder’s interest in systems that evolve beyond the artist’s complete control. Presented together, these works revealed the continued relevance of Calder’s vision, demonstrating how art can create space for uncertainty, collaboration, and new ways of imagining our relationship to the world around us.