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Nahmad Contemporary

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Nahmad Contemporary

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

11/26/2025

A study in color modulation and contrast that echoes the changing leaves of autumn, a seasonal transition toward deeper tones and saturated warmth.

Mark Rothko (1903–1970) approached color as a conduit for psychological and spiritual experience. Emerging from the New York School in the late 1940s, he developed his signature format of stacked chromatic rectangles, inviting viewers into a sustained, almost meditative encounter. In this period, his palette intensified, reflecting his interest in color’s capacity to evoke emotional states and feelings of transcendence.
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Mark Rothko, “Untitled (Violet, Black, Orange, Yellow on White and Red)”, 1949. Oil on canvas. 81 1/2 x 66 inches (207 x 167.6 cm). Gift, Elaine and Werner Dannheisser and The Dannheisser Foundation, 1978
(78.2461).

Courtesy of The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation / Art Resource, NY.

11/21/2025

🎩Happy Birthday, René Magritte!

Born in Belgium, Magritte mastered the art of visual paradox and became one of the most iconic figures of Surrealism. Through his play of logic and illusion, he invited viewers to look twice—and then again—at images they thought they understood.

In works like “The Lovers,” “The Empire of Light,” and “The Menaced Assassin,” Magritte layered the familiar with the inexplicable: veiled faces mid-kiss, daylight skies glowing above nighttime streets, and a crime scene suspended in uncanny stillness. These juxtapositions were never mere tricks but philosophical provocations, nudging us toward deeper questions about perception, desire, and the stories we project onto what we see.

Magritte’s legacy endures in his ability to make the ordinary extraordinary, urging us to look beyond appearances and into the poetic spaces where reality bends.
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Duane Michals, Magritte with Hand Over Face Exposing One Eye, 1965, gelatin silver print.
René Magritte, “LesAmantss,” 1928, oil on canvas.
René Magritte, “L’empire des lumières,” 1954, oil on canvas.
René Magritte, “L’Assassin menacé,” 1927, oil on canvas.

©️ 2025 C. Herscovici / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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980 Madison Avenue (Third Floor)
New York, NY
10075

Opening Hours

Monday	10am - 6pm
Tuesday	10am - 6pm
Wednesday	10am - 6pm
Thursday	10am - 6pm
Friday	10am - 6pm

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http://nahmadcontemporary.com/

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