Nassos Daphnis, Rita McBride
Gregory Lang
The exhibition, curated by Gregory Lang at Fondation CAB, establishes an unprecedented formal and conceptual dialogue. He presents a carefully selected group works by two American artists, from different generations, that leads visitors through a spatial form of abstraction situated between structure, surface, and architecture.
The display builds a dialogue between Nassos Daphnis’s paintings—characterized by expansive planes of primary color from different periods of his career, from the late 50’s to the 90’s—and Rita McBride’s sculptures, installations, and architectural models, from the last 30 years.
Nassos Daphnis (1914-2010), a key historical figure and pioneer of Hard-Edge Painting movement and Minimal Art, whose work was exhibited in the major American museums during his lifetime, was represented by the Leo Castelli Gallery with numerous solo and group exhibitions between 1958 and 1998.
Rita McBride (1960), internationally recognized for a multidisciplinary practice driving sculpture into the public sphere, is a contemporary artist and sculptress firmly established and exhibited in most major European and American museums and art centers, including recent exhibitions at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2023), and Dia Beacon (2023-2025).
On both a physical and conceptual level, the exhibition reveals how lines—depicted in two flat and expansive dimensions in Daphnis’s paintings and materialized as three-dimensional spatial structures in McBride’s work—shape perception and guide movement. By doing so, it invites reflection on art’s power to mold behavior, perception, and social interaction. Within the exhibition space, their works weave a ”crossed trajectory”: Daphnis’s lines act as an intangible visual framework, a kind of retinal grid, while McBride’s works function as bodily or interactive guides. Linear elements and directional cues are integrated throughout the spaces of the Fondation, creating an immersive and dynamic experience for the visitors.
Among their tangible connections, their works share a rigorous attention to surfaces and emphasize the minimalism of forms. Each focuses, respectively, on unadorned structure. Its purity defines movement and spatial divisions within Daphnis’s abstract compositions, whose perfectly smooth surfaces characterize his main series of paintings. In McBride’s sculptural ensembles, the sobriety of the structure embodies the quintessential minimalist ideal of a building or architectural element reduced to its strictest function.
The exhibition presents Daphnis’s seminal series of Pioneers paintings, characterized by planes of colors traversed by perfect straight lines extending from edge to edge. With the same geometric precision, these pictorial elements evolve into colorful arcs in his Flame and Transmitting Waves series, which explore more dynamic vibrations.
With geometric forms and domestic appearances, McBride’s installations and sculptures question the functional boundaries between art and industries of construction and design. They are crafted from materials drawn from reinterpreted classical sculpture (Glass Conduits from Murano on the wall, Marble Conduit from Carrara on the floor, bronze or aluminum cast Skylights, acrylic glass and aluminum architectural models Mobile, laminated wood Statacolor templates, wooden and inlays with metal A Stair).
The exhibition forges other dialogues: on the one hand, between his earliest abstract geometric color paintings from 1958 and his later painted abstractions from 1990—works inspired by early computer-generated screens that once populated interiors—and on the other hand, with her tapestries. These depict television calibration patterns, an analog system for adjusting a screen’s color and sharpness, here repurposed as substitutes for abstract decoration.
By combining two seemingly distant practices for the first time, Abstract Constructions, Nassos Daphnis – Rita McBride reveals unexpected dialogues between form and concept, opening a shared space that oscillates between functionality and poetry, authority and freedom.
This exhibition is possible thanks to the support of The Nassos Daphnis Estate and Richard Taittinger Gallery, New York, Galleries Alfonso Artiaco, Napoli, Konrad Fischer, Berlin-Cologne-Los Angeles, and Mai 36, Zurich.
