NAHMAD CONTEMPORARY Newsletter | June 2021 View this email in your browser (https://mailchi.mp/443c978204b8/nahmad-contemporary-newsletter-september-13360155?e=c39411af91) E X T E N D E D U N T I L J U L Y 2 4 , 2 0 2 1 The stunning combination of the two distinct series, ranging in time from 1995-2012, offers a deep voyage across the artist’s elusive practice. The two bodies of work unleash a full-court press on Hammons’ brilliance, both as an image-maker and unrivaled seer of contemporary culture. JUDD TULLY.NET (https://juddtully.net/blog/david-hammons-basketball-and-kool-aid-works-meet-at-nahmad-contemporary/) Nahmad Contemporary completes a trifecta of sorts, dazzling its visitors with an exhibition of two of Hammons’s lesser-known series: his collection of basketball prints and kool aid paintings. Featuring over a dozen works, David Hammons: Basketball and Kool Aid is an ode to Hammons’s unique command of everyday materials and social criticism. The exhibition foregrounds Hammons’s experimentations with the titular sport and beverage, stereotypical motifs of Blackness which Hammons uses to articulate a celebration of Black culture alongside a critique of America’s stereotyping, monetizing, and fettishizing of it. WHITEHOT MAGAZINE OF CONTEMPORARY ART (https://whitehotmagazine.com/articles/hammons-at-nahmad-contemporary-elsewhere/5036) Hammons is now displaying thought-provoking works at Nahmad Contemporary. As part of an exhibition entitled “Basketball & Kool-Aid,” the artist developed a selection of pieces made using ragged basketballs sourced from New York’s Harlem neighborhood and Kool-aid that draw upon his personal experiences as Black man while touching on racial stereotypes, prejudices, and identities in the United States. HYPEBEAST (https://hypebeast.com/2021/5/david-hammons-basketball-kool-aid-exhibition-nahmad-contemporary) Rare Exhibition of David Hammons’s Basketball, Kool-Aid Works Comes to New York (...) shining a light on two series that have never before been surveyed in-depth. ARTNEWS (https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/david-hammons-basketball-kool-aid-works-new-york-survey-1234591204/) Any major David Hammons exhibition feels like an event, and Nahmad Contemporary’s presentation of two rarely shown bodies of work by the artist is no exception. ARTNET NEWS (https://news.artnet.com/market/david-hammons-nahmad-contemporary-1969101) http://www.nahmadcontemporary.com/exhibitions/david-hammons-basketball-and-kool-aid Installation view of "David Hammons: Basketball and Kool-Aid" at Nahmad Contemporary NEW YORK—David Hammons: Basketball and Kool-Aid, an exhibition dedicated to two radical series of works that the seminal American artist created between 1995 and 2012 is extended through July 24, 2021. This is the first in-depth presentation of either body of work, for which Hammons employed vanguard artistic methods and unconventional materials to create abstract compositions, parlaying his keen formal, material, and conceptual understandings into deeply compelling works of art. Installation view of "David Hammons: Basketball and Kool-Aid" at Nahmad Contemporary Invoking the material concerns of Arte Povera and the conceptual investigations of Marcel Duchamp, David Hammons appropriates the ephemera of daily life to explore the cultural and societal subtexts inherent to materials, images, objects, and language. A consistent thread throughout his multifaceted oeuvre, which spans over 50 years, is an investigation of racial stereotypes, prejudices, and identities in the United States. As such, the Basketball (1995–2012) and Kool-Aid (2003–07) works explore constructions of race and the clichéd associations bound to black American experience and culture. The delicate, grey-scale abstractions in Hammons’ Basketball drawings (1995–2012) belie their unorthodox means of creation, in which the artist bounced basketballs—often covered in “Harlem dirt”—onto sheets of white paper. The transformative mark-making is an allegory for the societal and monetary transcendence that the sport promises marginalized communities. Furthermore, the unpredictable trajectory of the dribbled ball on the surface summons the volatile and often chance-based path of many athletes who endeavor to reach NBA fame. Hammons first called attention to the sport’s encumbered symbol of opportunity for disenfranchised African American youths in the 1980s with public sculptural works such as Human Pegs/Pole Dreams (1982) and Higher Goals (1986) that feature unattainably tall basketball hoops. In many of the works from his Basketball series, Hammons also incorporated found objects—ranging from a suitcase or alarm clock to a mound of asphalt or bricks—with symbolically loaded associations to the sport. The suitcase, for instance, can be interpreted as the luxury of travel afforded to professional athletes or as a pun on the game’s terminology of “traveling with the ball,” and the asphalt may reference the urban surface on which the sport originated. By transforming the works from two-dimensional framed drawings to sculptural entities, Hammons calls attention to the agency of art to do more than sit idly as a passive object of consumption. Installation view of "David Hammons: Basketball and Kool-Aid" at Nahmad Contemporary To make his Kool-Aid works (2003–07), Hammons applied the popular powdered drink to paper in vibrant, explosive swaths of color, embellishing some with Japanese script that spells out the process for mixing Kool-Aid. While the visually appealing and sumptuous compositions evoke abstract expressionism and color field painting, they destabilize this tradition through their unconventional materials, which recall Ed Ruscha’s stain series and Andy Warhol’s oxidation paintings. Further, the Kool-Aid drawings are unmistakably rife with political commentary: the association of the inexpensive sugary drink with African American culture, and the phrase “drinking the Kool-Aid,” which stems from the “Jonestown Massacre” in which over 900 members of the Peoples Temple movement (many of them African American) died. As in the Basketball drawings, these works include sculptural elements: silk veils that cover the surfaces of the works (to protect the fugitive Kool-Aid pigment from sunlight), and frames wrapped in colored terry cloth. These elements reflect Hammons’ affinity for the art of assemblage and found objects, and his particular interest in drapery and concealment, which can be traced from his earliest body prints of the 1960s to his recent tarp paintings (which he produced immediately following the silk-shrouded Kool Aid works.) His choice to incorporate fabric that obscures the composition speaks to his larger critique of the commodification and objectification of art. Through unconventional artistic methods and media, both series evoke powerful political associations while demonstrating the artist’s ingenuity. The brilliance of these “sculptural” drawings, offering cultural symbolism and contemplative connotations, resides in their subtlety and elusiveness that ultimately provokes curious and reflective inquiry about the practices and beliefs shaping our identities. press release (http://www.nahmadcontemporary.com/exhibitions/david-hammons-basketball-and-kool-aid) P R E V I O U S E X H I B I T I O N S H A R D F E E L I N G S Sept. 11 - Oct. 26, 2019 http://www.nahmadcontemporary.com/exhibitions/uncovered-miro-i-hammons ( U N ) C O V E R E D M I R Ó I H A M M O N S Sept. 12 - Nov. 17, 2018 press release (http://www.nahmadcontemporary.com/exhibitions/uncovered-miro-i-hammons) publication (http://www.nahmadcontemporary.com/publications/uncovered-miro-hammons) A R T I S T S N E W S https://whitney.org/exhibitions/david-hammons-days-end D A V I D H A M M O N S DAY'S END (2021) Homage to Gordon Matta-Clark Whitney Museum of American Art On permanent view info (https://whitney.org/exhibitions/david-hammons-days-end) https://www.pinaultcollection.com/en/boursedecommerce/david-hammons D A V I D H A M M O N S Bourse de Commerce Pinault Collection, Paris Until Dec. 31, 2021 info (https://www.pinaultcollection.com/en/boursedecommerce/david-hammons) J E A N - M I C H E L B A S Q U I A T 13 works by Jean-Michel Basquiat The Broad, Los Angeles info (https://www.thebroad.org/) A L E X A N D E R C A L D E R Modern from the Start MoMA Until Aug. 7, 2021 info (https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/5209) Pierre Matisse, an Art Dealer in New York Musée Matisse, Nice Until Sept. 30, 2021 info (https://www.musee-matisse-nice.org/en/exposition/pierre-matisse-un-marchand-dart-a-new-york-2/) https://www.pinaultcollection.com/en/boursedecommerce/urs-fischer U R S F I S C H E R Bourse de Commerce Pinault Collection, Paris Until Dec. 31, 2021 info (https://www.pinaultcollection.com/en/boursedecommerce/urs-fischer) G E O R G E S M A T H I E U Calligraphy Rhapsody Retrospective Exhibition of Georges Mathieu K11 Art & Cultural Centre, Hong Kong Until July 4, 2021 info (https://www.k11artfoundation.org/en/article/calligraphy-rhapsody-retrospective-exhibition-of-georges-mathieu/) P A B L O P I C A S S O Collection Nahmad | Ten Masterpieces Picasso Museum, Antibes Until Oct. 31, 2021 info (https://en.calameo.com/read/002074504617b97a5dd7c) Picasso & Les Femmes d'Alger Berggruen Museum, Berlin Until Aug 8, 2021 info (https://www.smb.museum/en/museums-institutions/museum-berggruen/exhibitions/detail/picasso-les-femmes-dalger/) R U D O L F S T I N G E L Bourse de Commerce Pinault Collection, Paris Until Dec. 31, 2021 info (https://www.pinaultcollection.com/en/boursedecommerce/rudolf-stingel) NAHMAD CONTEMPORARY 980 MADISON AVE ⎮ NEW YORK ⎮ NY ⎮10075 [email protected] (mailto:[email protected]) +1 646 449 9118 Monday-Saturday, 10AM-6PM http://www.nahmadcontemporary.com/ https://www.instagram.com/nahmadcontemporary/?hl=en https://www.facebook.com/Nahmad-Contemporary-761104604029387/ https://www.twitter.com/Joe_Nahmad/ Installation views at Nahmad Contemporary, Photographs by Tom Powel Imaging ©️ David Hammons ©️ Miró / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris 2021 ©️ David Hammons, Day's End (2021) under construction at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Photo by Timothy Schenck. ©️ David Hammons, Installation view of the exhibition at the Bourse de Commerce, Pinault Collection ©️ Jean-Michel Basquiat, The Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Licensed by Artestar, New York, Installation view at the Broad Museum ©️ Alexander Calder, Installation view of the exhibition "Alexander Calder: Modern from the Start" at the MoMA ©️ Urs Fischer, Installation view of the exhibition at the Bourse de Commerce, Pinault Collection ©️ Comité Georges Mathieu ©️ Pablo Picasso, Succession Picasso, 2021 ©️ Rudolf Stingel, Installation view of the exhibition at the Bourse de Commerce, Pinault Collection ============================================================ If you received this email in error or no longer wish to receive these mailings, you can click here to ** unsubscribe (https://nahmadcontemporary.us17.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=b70673086d081550990c36524&id=62f68f98d0&e=c39411af91&c=b722d40ef4)