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Nahmad Contemporary Art gallery founded by Joseph Nahmad in 2013 presenting historically-focused exhibitions from leadin

09/21/2026

“Art, in any medium, I view as pure philosophy yet also serving a social function.” — Lucio Fontana (1899–1968)

While Fontana is best known for his groundbreaking slashed, monochrome paintings, his celebrated Venezie cycle is rich with novel ideas, incorporating gestural marks and multimedia materials to pay homage to Venice and the city’s Byzantine ornamentation. Venice provided a reservoir of visual information that, through Fontana’s masterful interpretation, served to expand the boundaries of painting beyond its traditional limits.

Nahmad Contemporary will present FONTANA: Venice and the Architecture of Space at Independent 20th Century, featuring “Concetto spaziale, In Piazza San Marco di notte con Teresita” (1961), a masterpiece from Fontana’s time in Venice, shown for the first time in New York City 65 years ago.

Independent 20th Century will take place September 24–27 at The Breuer in New York. Learn more at the link in bio.

09/10/2026

Lucio Fontana embedded fragments of Murano glass and sand into the densely worked surfaces of his Pietre series, evoking the jewel-like opacity of the mosaics of Basilica di San Marco. This material exploration would inform his Venezie series, in which the sensory environment of Venice translated into punctured surfaces, light, and atmosphere.

In “Contemplazione e Metamorfosi. Una Lirica Cinematografica” (1955), filmmakers Gian Andrea Rocco and Pino Sergi present a lyrical reflection on the dynamic visual properties of glass in Fontana’s work.

View select works from these series at our Independent 20th Century presentation: FONTANA: VENICE AND THE ARCHITECTURE OF SPACE, September 24–27.

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“Contemplazione e Metamorfosi: Una Lirica Cinematografica,” 1955. Directed by Gian Andrea Rocco and Pino Sergi. Produced by Opus Films. Luce Cinecitta’ Historical Archive.

08/20/2026

“I make a hole; the infinite passes through, light passes through — there is no need to paint.” — Lucio Fontana

Before Fontana’s iconic slashed canvases, or Tagli (Cuts), came his Buchi (Holes). He began making his first punctured works in 1949, piercing through the surface of the canvas to open it up to the space beyond and evoke what he called an “infinite dimension.” With this technique, Fontana introduced space, light, time, and movement into his paintings, challenging the limits of the canvas and changing the course of postwar art.
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Lucio Fontana’s silhouette as he pierces and slashes his canvases. Avantgarde `60: Cathedral of the Fair, 1967. Rai Teche Material licensed by Rai Com S.p.A.

08/06/2026

Today, August 6, is the 98th birthday of Andy Warhol, so here he is on the red carpet at the first MTV Video Music Awards in 1984. He was 56 and the host of Andy Warhol’s Fifteen Minutes, an MTV show built around the big ideas of his work: celebrity, publicity, and the machinery of fame.

The first VMAs brought music, TV, fashion, and art together but Warhol had been doing that since the 60s. Warhol didn’t create MTV but he created the world that led to MTV. The channel is another example of how he changed the world.

Happy Birthday, Andy

“In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.” – Andy WarholIn “Beyond Its 15 Minutes: Andy Warhol’s Wat...
12/18/2025

“In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.” – Andy Warhol

In “Beyond Its 15 Minutes: Andy Warhol’s Watch Obsession Still Ticks On,” we look at Warhol’s collection of 313 watches, ranging from Patek Philippe and Audemars Piguet to novelty quartz pieces, and how they reflected the “high-low” sensibility central to his Pop practice and personal mythology. For Warhol, watches were often symbols rather than tools.

Read the full story by Brynn Wallner () of .co at the link in bio.
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Polaroid self-portrait by Andy Warhol, c. 1970 ©️ The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.

Today, we mark Kandinsky’s birthday by revisiting the ideas that informed his move into large-scale abstraction.His enga...
12/16/2025

Today, we mark Kandinsky’s birthday by revisiting the ideas that informed his move into large-scale abstraction.

His engagement with Theosophy in the early 1910s laid the groundwork for his theory that painting could act as a conduit for transcendental experience. Kandinsky believed that abstract color and form had the power to generate intense emotional and spiritual vibrations in viewers that bypassed human logic, stirring a deep internal response.

In “Composition VII” (1913), this vision reaches its most immersive expression: sweeping currents, fractured planes, and saturated color fuse into a single turbulent field. The work suggests a world composed not of discrete tangible forms but of energies in motion, reflecting the metaphysical concepts that helped shape his early abstraction.

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Photograph of Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944). Paris, December 1936. ©️ Boris Lipnitzki / Roger-Viollet.

Wassily Kandinsky, Composition VII, 1913, oil on canvas. IanDagnall Computing / Alamy.

In 2025, New York reaffirmed Jean-Michel Basquiat’s place in its cultural bloodstream. After the city officially christe...
12/15/2025

In 2025, New York reaffirmed Jean-Michel Basquiat’s place in its cultural bloodstream. After the city officially christened a section of Great Jones Street “Jean-Michel Basquiat Way” — returning his name to the site where he lived and worked through much of the 1980s — the Studio Museum in Harlem followed suit with its own nod to the artist’s extraordinary legacy. This November, upon opening its new David Adjaye–designed home, the institution unveiled its first Jean-Michel Basquiat painting, “Bayou” (1984), a landmark acquisition that reflects the artist’s expanding presence within American museum collections.

Explore the full scope of 2025’s cultural landscape, including Basquiat’s “Bayou,” in “From Calder’s Rise to Basquiat’s Reign: Art in 2025” at the link in bio.

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Jean-Michel Basquiat, Bayou, 1984, oil, acrylic, collage, and wax on canvas, 85 3/4 x 98 inches. Studio Museum in Harlem; gift of Joseph and Amy Perella. 2023.23.1. Photo: John Berens.©️ Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Licensed by Artestar, New York.

In 2016, Nahmad Contemporary examined how meaning shifts when artists treat language, pattern, and process as core mater...
12/11/2025

In 2016, Nahmad Contemporary examined how meaning shifts when artists treat language, pattern, and process as core material. Across the gallery’s program, viewers were invited to consider how visual lexicons evolve, how repetition becomes generative, and how the rules of authorship can be rewritten through the act of creation.

This focus came into view through two landmark exhibitions: “Words Are All We Have: Paintings by Jean-Michel Basquiat” and Daniel Buren’s “Origin of Stripes: Paintings from 1965–1966.” Basquiat deployed words and cultural fragments as charged elements that complicate authorship, while Buren turned to disciplined, standardized stripes to question the structures of perception. Together, their approaches underscored the year’s central idea: communication’s basic units — verbal, visual, procedural — can illuminate new ways of seeing and interpreting art. Explore the full editorial, “12 Years of Vision at Nahmad Contemporary: 2016,” at the link in bio.

Installation view, Words Are All We Have: Paintings by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Nahmad Contemporary, 2 May–18 June 2016. Photographs by Tom Powel Imaging.

Installation view, Daniel Buren’s Origin of Stripes: Paintings from 1965-1966, Nahmad Contemporary, 15 September–22 October 22, 2016. Photographs by Tom Powel Imaging.

Revisiting “Henri Matisse & Jonas Wood” (2023), an exhibition that brought Matisse’s iconic explorations of line, patter...
12/09/2025

Revisiting “Henri Matisse & Jonas Wood” (2023), an exhibition that brought Matisse’s iconic explorations of line, pattern, and domestic space into direct conversation with Wood’s distinctly contemporary idiom.

Through paintings, drawings, and prints, the presentation traced how Matisse’s visual vocabulary continues to shape Wood’s approach to flattening space, intensifying color, and transforming everyday interiors into charged pictorial environments.

Installation views, Nahmad Contemporary at Tarmak22, Gstaad, 2023. Photography by Julien Gremaud.

A darkly humorous counterpoint to the holiday table, Francis Bacon’s “Chicken” (1982) turns a familiar subject into some...
11/27/2025

A darkly humorous counterpoint to the holiday table, Francis Bacon’s “Chicken” (1982) turns a familiar subject into something uncanny and electric.

Francis Bacon, “Chicken”, 1982, oil, pastel and dry transfer lettering on canvas. [CR NUMBER 82-03]. ©️The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved. / DACS, London / ARS, NY 2025.

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