Nahmad Contemporary

About the Gallery
Founded in 2013, Nahmad Contemporary is dedicated to the presentation of innovative, historically focused exhibitions. The gallery specializes in leading Contemporary artists who rose to prominence during the 1980s, and a selection of Modern masters from the 20th century.

The scope of Nahmad Contemporary’s program includes exhibitions that historicize Contemporary artists by illuminating a distinct series, medium, or focus within their oeuvre.

Additionally, the gallery features Modern masters to inspire contemporary perspectives on particular works from their canon.

Further pivotal to Nahmad Contemporary’s program are the thematic shows that feature a vibrant selection of artists in dialogue across generations and geographical spheres.

On occasion, the gallery stages exhibitions showcasing recent works by select artists working today.

About the Presentation
Nahmad Contemporary will present work by Lucio Fontana in a solo presentation at Independent 20th Century. This presentation positions Venice as central to the evolution of Fontana’s works between 1956 and 1961, framing it as both influence and structure in his rethinking of space. Beginning with pieces from the early Pietre and Barocchi series and culminating in a masterpiece from the renowned Venezie cycle, the presentation highlights Venice and all its enchantments as a powerful source of inspiration and a unifying theme that links these diverse bodies of work. Serving as a historical anchor that deepens the focus on Venice in Fontana’s work, the 65th anniversary of his debut of the Venezie series at the Martha Jackson Gallery in New York—a show that both enthralled and puzzled American audiences—is commemorated in this presentation. This installation of works will also mark the return of Fontana's art to the Breuer in a dedicated presentation for the first time since the Metropolitan Museum of Art held his 2019 retrospective in the building. As an architectural landmark completed just a few years after Fontana’s Venezie suite, the Breuer provides a poetic context for this selection of canvases. Indeed, Marcel Breuer and Fontana both stand as defining figures in the canon of mid-century aesthetics—similarly driven by interests in technological advancement, principles of sculpture, and monumentality, inspired, in part, by the art and architecture of the past. These interests emerge as central concerns across the four works on view. In each canvas, Fontana returns to Venice as a lens through which to explore these concepts.

For Fontana, Venice was not only a captivating sensorial environment and a place of personal significance, but also a metaphorical landscape, a reservoir of analogies through which to organize his thinking around space, its paradoxes, and its psychological resonances. A land of Baroque and Byzantine marvels, steeped in histories of human innovation, avant-garde ideas, and romance, Venice serves as the connective tissue between the four canvases in Nahmad Contemporary’s presentation. Taking the artist’s groundbreaking Concetto spaziale, In Piazza San Marco di Notte con Teresita as its point of departure, this grouping highlights Fontana’s experimentation with reflective materials, surface textures, and gestural marks––defining features of his Venezie series––and explores the relationship of these strategies to the various facets of Venice that inspired him. In doing so, this presentation illuminates the diverse ways in which the Italian island continuously shaped Fontana’s approach to space as both subject and medium.