Across its 2024 program, Nahmad Contemporary explored the ways artists reinvent the figure. From iconic characters and self-portraits to modernist interpretations of the human body, the year’s exhibitions brought together artists who reimagined recognizable forms across generations, cultures, and artistic traditions, transforming them into vehicles for new ideas and ways of seeing.
In January, Mathieu Malouf: Women and Penguins examined beauty and archetype by pairing the grand tradition of the female nude with the stark formal simplicity of penguins. In Gstaad, a presentation devoted to Takashi Murakami’s celebrated Mr. DOB and Miss Ko² traced the evolution of two of contemporary art’s most recognizable characters, whose lasting appeal has allowed them to transcend their origins as cultural icons.
Questions of representation came into sharper focus in the year's subsequent exhibitions. Dubuffet x Giacometti brought together two artists whose deeply existential yet radically different conceptions of the human figure reshaped postwar art, while Yours Truly examined the self-portrait as a site of identity, subjectivity, and self-invention through a multigenerational, international group of contemporary artists. Concluding the year, a presentation of Raoul Dufy returned to the artist’s luminous vision of color, light, and decorative form, reaffirming painting’s perennial capacity to transform everyday experiences into extraordinary visions. The 2024 program traced the remarkable elasticity of representation as it evolved alongside culture, history, and evolving artistic ideas.
As the gallery enters its next chapter, we have enjoyed reflecting on and reframing Nahmad Contemporary’s 12-year journey.
TAKASHI MURAKAMI
Gstaad | 14 February–20 March 2024
Conceived during the formative years of Takashi Murakami’s career, Mr. DOB and Miss Ko² are among the defining protagonists of the artist's visual universe. Bringing together nine large-scale sculptures, Nahmad Contemporary’s presentation examined how these enduring figures have evolved alongside Murakami's practice over more than three decades.
In this time, these figures have continually shifted in appearance and meaning, reflecting Murakami’s enduring interest in reinvention rather than repetition. Rooted in the visual language of manga, anime, and otaku culture, Mr. DOB and Miss Ko² blur the boundaries between fine art and popular media, originality and reproduction, fantasy and commerce. Their meticulous fabrication reflects the artist’s commitment to technical precision, while their continual evolution reveals an artist who returns to the same figures not to repeat them, but to expand their expressive possibilities.
By presenting these foundational characters together, the exhibition illuminated the remarkable consistency of Murakami’s vision. More than recurring motifs, Mr. DOB and Miss Ko² have become enduring artistic avatars through which the artist continues to explore identity, authorship, and the nature of the contemporary image.
DUBUFFET X GIACOMETTI
1 May–8 June 2024
More than 50 years after their only dedicated pairing at Sidney Janis Gallery in New York, Dubuffet x Giacometti reunited two artists whose practices fundamentally reshaped postwar art. Though contemporaries who moved within many of the same Parisian circles, Jean Dubuffet and Alberto Giacometti developed distinct artistic languages in response to the same existential questions posed by the aftermath of the Second World War. Bringing together more than 20 paintings and sculptures, the exhibition invited viewers to consider their work in dialogue.
Both artists grappled with the fragility and alienation of the human condition yet arrived at strikingly different conclusions. Giacometti distilled the figure into attenuated forms that evoke vulnerability and endurance, while Dubuffet embraced raw materiality and an intentionally anti-academic aesthetic, rejecting conventional ideals of beauty in favor of instinct and immediacy. Rather than resolving these differences, the exhibition illuminated the productive tension between two singular visions of postwar humanity.
By placing these landmark practices side by side, Dubuffet x Giacometti offered a fresh perspective on two artists whose parallel, yet profoundly different approaches remain integral in shaping our understanding of modern art today.