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Nahmad Contemporary

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David Hammons has spent five decades resisting the conventions that typically define a career in contemporary art, working instead with unorthodox materials on his own terms.

Standing Room Only (1996) reflects that approach. A ginger cat sleeps, curled and still, atop a djembe, the West African drum central to Black musical tradition. The image appears quiet, even domestic. Yet the alley cat evokes the absent street musician, a figure jazzmen have long identified with, while the drum points to the African roots of jazz. A small still life resting on an instrument that symbolizes a continent’s music.

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David Hammons, "Standing Room Only," 1996, taxidermied cat on wooden drum. © David Hammons / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. by @nahmadcontemporary

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5 hours ago

La Californie, Cannes, 1956. Pablo Picasso and Jacqueline Roque in the garden of the villa, photographed by Edward Quinn during what would become one of the most well-documented periods of Picasso’s life. He had moved to La Californie the year before with Jacqueline, whom he would marry in 1961, and the household soon filled with animals, sculpture, and the daily rituals that Quinn, David Douglas Duncan, and others recorded across the decade.

Beside them is Esmeralda, a young goat Jacqueline gave Picasso as a Christmas gift that year. Her arrival carried a particular resonance. Six years earlier, in the pottery town of Vallauris, Picasso had made La Chèvre (1950), an assemblage sculpture built from a wicker basket, ceramic pots, palm leaves, metal, and plaster. It became one of his most consequential postwar works. When the bronze cast arrived at La Californie, Esmeralda was often tied up beside it in the garden, the living goat and the sculptural one keeping each other company.

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Pablo and Jacqueline Picasso with Esmeralda. La Californie, Cannes, Christmas 1956. Photo Edward Quinn, ©edwardquinn.com.

Pablo and Claude Picasso, La Californie, Cannes 1956. Photo Edward Quinn, ©edwardquinn.com. by @nahmadcontemporary

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2 days ago

Today marks the birthday of Alexander Calder, born July 22, 1898, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Photographed here installing one of his mobiles, Calder spent much of his career adjusting his sculptures by hand. He balanced wires and precisely cut steel forms and watched to see how they would move. The mobiles were never fixed compositions. They were made to bob and sway with wind currents, with the shifts of a room, with the reverberating footsteps of spectators.

Calder often spoke of sculpture as something continuous with the world around it rather than sealed off from it. His breakthrough was not simply to set sculpture in motion but to embrace unpredictability as an essential part of the work. In his hands, form became a proposition open to the changing conditions of the site, the air, and the passage of time.

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Calder installing International Mobile, Third Exhibition of Sculpture, Philadelphia

Museum of Art, 1949. Photograph by Herbert Gehr. © 2026 Calder Foundation, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; © Life Magazine by @nahmadcontemporary

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3 days ago

In 2023, Nahmad Contemporary marked its tenth anniversary with a program that reaffirmed painting’s capacity to renew itself through experimentation and exchange.

“Henri Matisse & Jonas Wood” brought together the work of the two artists for the first time, presenting painting as an ongoing conversation across generations, in which domestic interiors, plants, and familiar objects become vehicles for invention rather than description.

“Richard Prince | FREAKS” gathered a cast of figures with roots in the artist’s practice reaching back more than fifty years, from the “dead” head drawings of 1972 through the Hippie Drawings and High Times paintings. Across the show, these eccentric characters emerged for the first time as fully independent subjects.

Read the full feature at the link in bio.
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Installation views, “Henri Matisse & Jonas Wood,” Nahmad Contemporary at Tarmak22, Gstaad, 14 February–12 March 2023. Photographs by Julien Gremaud.

Installation view, “Richard Prince | Freaks,” Nahmad Contemporary, 1 November–23 December 2023. Photograph by Tom Powel Imaging. by @nahmadcontemporary

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4 days ago

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14 days ago

🇦🇷⚽️ Daniel Buren, “Fibres optiques - Bleu clair J2,” 2013, Optical fibre fabric, white LED + coloured screen printing, white paint, oven-lacquered metal casing, electrical components.

© SCAI THE BATHHOUSE. © DB - ADAGP, Paris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2026. by @nahmadcontemporary

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7 days ago

On the evening of March 26, 1952, Nicolas de Staël attended a football match between France and Sweden at the Parc des Princes in Paris. He left the stadium transformed. Working through the night and across the days that followed, he produced a group of paintings drawn from the colors and movements of the game, the floodlit pitch, the shifting field of jerseys, the bodies of the players in motion.

"Footballeurs" belongs to that series. Painted on canvas at a small scale, the work compresses the geometry of the field into flat panels of red, green, blue, and black, the figures rendered as clear vertical accents against the ground. It was among the first paintings in which de Staël allowed figuration to return to his work. The turn drew sharp criticism from proponents of pure abstraction, but de Staël continued, resulting in the final, most productive phase of his career.

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Nicolas de Staël, "Footballeurs" (The Soccer Players), 1952, oil on canvas. Musée Granet/Aix-en-Provence/France. ©️ RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY. by @nahmadcontemporary

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6 days ago

🇪🇸⚽️ Mark Rothko, Untitled, 1969, oil on paper laid down on canvas.

©️ 1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. by @nahmadcontemporary

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7 days ago

Happy birthday to Giorgio De Chirico, one of the twentieth century’s most consequential and disputed artists. Between roughly 1909 and 1919, across Florence, Paris, and Ferrara, he developed the body of work that would come to be known as metaphysical painting. The deserted plazas, classical arcades, mannequins, and shadowed clocks depicted in his canvases would shape the visual language of Surrealism a decade later and influence generations of painters across Europe and the Americas.

From the 1920s onward, de Chirico turned toward a more traditional, often Baroque idiom, evident in the costumed self-portraits, the still lifes, and the horses on the shore. The shift was met with confusion and hostility by the same critics who had championed his early work. De Chirico embraced the rupture rather than apologizing for it. What followed was a long, contrarian late career only recently reconsidered on its own terms.

A painter who refused, across more than six decades, to settle into anyone’s expectations of who he should be.

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Giorgio de Chirico in his Roman apartment. Photo by Rolls Press / Popperfoto via Getty Images. ©️ 2026 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SIAE, Rome.2026 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SIAE, Rome. by @nahmadcontemporary

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15 days ago

Picasso painted this small canvas during the summer he spent in Dinard on the Brittany coast, part of a group of surreal beach scenes he made across 1928 and 1929, in which the human body is elongated, dismantled, and stretched beyond any anatomical logic.

The Dinard beach paintings mark a turning point in Picasso's practice. Working at small scale, many on wood panels no larger than a page, though this particular work is painted on canvas, he began to push the figure toward the monumental sculptural language he would develop in the years that followed.

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Pablo Picasso, "Bathers Playing with a Ball (Baigneuses au Ballon)," 1928, oil on canvas. © DeA Picture Library / Art Resource, NY. © 2026 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. by @nahmadcontemporary

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11 days ago

Jean Dubuffet’s "Group of Four Trees," a forty-two-foot-tall sculpture, was installed on the plaza at 28 Liberty Street in 1972.

The sculpture was commissioned by David Rockefeller for the former Chase Manhattan Bank Plaza.

Dubuffet conceived the work as part of his Hourloupe cycle, the twelve-year project he began in 1962 as a sketch on a telephone pad and that evolved into an entire visual language of interlocking forms and hatched black lines, first on the picture plane and later, increasingly, in three dimensions.

The four “trees,” rendered in painted epoxy and polyurethane, extend the Hourloupe from drawing into architecture. Their forms rise above the passersby who move through the plaza on their way to and from work, offering, in Dubuffet’s phrase, a “mental landscape” against the vertical grid of the surrounding towers.

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Jean Dubuffet's "Group of Four Trees," 1972, Chase Plaza, New York. Bernard Gotfryd photograph collection (Library of Congress). Jean Dubuffet © 2026 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris. by @nahmadcontemporary

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16 days ago

One of David Hammons's earliest body prints, "Pray for America" was made by pressing his skin and clothing, smeared with grease, against the surface of the paper. Hammons made the work in 1969, a year after the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, amid nationwide protests, demonstrations against the Vietnam War, and unrest across American cities.

Hammons described the body prints as part of his "moral obligation as a Black artist to try to graphically document what I feel socially." More than fifty years later, the image still holds extraordinary power.

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David Hammons, "Pray for America," 1969, screenprint and pigment on paper. The Museum of Modern Art and The Studio Museum in Harlem. © 2026 David Hammons / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. by @nahmadcontemporary

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21 days ago