Marking its tenth anniversary, Nahmad Contemporary’s 2023 program celebrated painting’s capacity to transform perception. As attention across the art world shifted from technological novelty back toward the material, the year’s exhibitions reaffirmed painting as a medium of constant renewal, foregrounding creative intuition and artistic lineage as enduring sources of invention.
Anchored by the anniversary exhibition The First Decade, the year’s focused presentations carried those ideas forward. Throughout the program, thematic and formal qualities became vehicles for experiences that moved beyond observation toward imagination, reverie, and the sublime. Henri Matisse & Jonas Wood revealed how modern innovations in color, pattern, and pictorial space continue to shape contemporary painting, while Ugly Painting embraced distortion and expressive excess as deliberate aesthetic strategies. A presentation of Marie Laurencin’s paintings reclaimed the dreamlike, feminine world she cultivated beyond the dominant narratives of modernism, and Richard Prince’s FREAKS revisited half a century of imagery transforming countercultural archetypes into introspective meditations on memory, identity, and belonging.
The tenth anniversary program reaffirmed Nahmad Contemporary's enduring belief that the history of painting is not static but often revived through experimentation and exchange.
As the gallery enters its next chapter, we will continue to reflect on and reframe Nahmad Contemporary’s 12-year journey.
HENRI MATISSE & JONAS WOOD
Gstaad | 14 February–12 March 2023
Bringing together the work of Henri Matisse and Jonas Wood for the first time, this exhibition presented painting as an ongoing conversation across generations. Separated by nearly a century, the two artists share a fascination with the quiet poetry of domestic life, transforming interiors, plants, and familiar objects into richly orchestrated compositions where creative ingenuity takes precedence over naturalistic description. Rather than depicting the world as it appears, both artists construct immersive visual environments in which decorative motifs, architecture, and figures dissolve into a unified pictorial language.
Here, artistic lineage emerged not as inheritance alone, but as a continual act of reinterpretation. Matisse painted from carefully staged interiors, returning repeatedly to familiar motifs through observation and revision, while Wood builds his compositions from photographs, drawings, and collage, filtering lived experience through a distinctly contemporary process of selection and construction. Despite their different methods, each artist arrives at paintings shaped as much by invention as by perception.
Throughout the presentation, echoes of Matisse’s formal innovations surfaced within Wood's work — not as quotation or homage, but as evidence of modernism’s lasting vitality. By placing their paintings in direct dialogue, Henri Matisse & Jonas Wood demonstrated that painting's history is never fixed. It is routinely renewed as artists revisit inherited visual languages, reshaping them into personal expressions of their own time.
RICHARD PRINCE | FREAKS
1 November–23 December 2023
Richard Prince’s FREAKS brought into focus a cast of figures whose origins reach back more than fifty years. Their earliest antecedents appeared in the artist’s “dead” head drawings of 1972, before resurfacing within the countercultural world of his Hippie Drawings and, later, the kaleidoscopic High Times paintings. In RICAHRD PRINCE | FREAKS, however, these familiar characters emerged for the first time as fully independent subjects.
Created in 2022 and titled Untitled (1967), the works demonstrate Prince’s enduring habit of revisiting and reshaping preexisting visual languages — this time his own. Rather than repeating earlier motifs, he reimagines them. Detached from the collective identities of Prince’s earlier series, the figures now stand alone, their exaggerated physiognomies rendered with intricate networks of line that lend them both psychological presence and unsettling ambiguity.
FREAKS proposed that artistic lineage can be an internal dialogue as much as a historical one. Prince returns to an image that has accompanied his practice for decades, not to preserve it, but to discover what it might become. In doing so, the exhibition reaffirmed one of the year’s central ideas: that painting — and artistic practice more broadly — remains vital through acts of revision, allowing familiar forms to acquire new meaning with time.