Nassos Daphnis, Rita McBride
Gregory Lang
Guest curator Gregory Lang proposes a unique connection between two American artists from different generations: Nassos Daphnis (1914, Greece – 2010, New York), a major historical artist presenting his first exhibition with his Estate in Western Europe, and contemporary artist Rita McBride (1960, Iowa, USA, lives and works in Düsseldorf and Los Angeles), already well-established on the European art scene.
The exhibition brings together a selection of works that lead us through a spatial abstraction exploring the interplay between structure, surface, and architecture. The exhibition combines paintings by Nassos Daphnis, characterized by large areas of color from various periods, with sculptures, installations, and architectural models by the artist Rita McBride. Linear elements and directional cues are integrated into the Foundation’s different spaces, creating a fertile ground for experience.
From a physical and conceptual perspective, the exhibition reveals, among other things, how the use of lines—painted in 2D in Daphnis’s practice—and spatial pathways—3D in McBride’s work—create perceptual frameworks and guide our movements, thus questioning how art can shape behaviors, perceptions, and social interactions. Their works, arranged together, create a “cross-path” within the exhibition space, where, like an intangible retinal grid, Daphnis’s lines serve as a visual metaphor and McBride’s works as bodily or interactive guides.
Among the tangible connections, their works share a demanding attention to surfaces and emphasize the minimalism of forms. Both artists focus on unadorned structure, whether it defines movement and spatial division in the perfectly smooth abstract compositions of his major series of paintings, or whether it is a quintessential minimalist dream of a building or architectural element reduced, in her case, to its strict function within her sculptural ensembles.
A twofold connection is established in the exhibition: firstly, between his earliest paintings on canvas, featuring abstract colored geometric planes from 1958-59, and his later painted abstractions from 1990, marked by the advent of computer screens; and secondly, with regard to her tapestries, which depict television test patterns—an analog method for adjusting the color and sharpness of a television—used here as a substitute for abstract decoration.
Thus, the combined works of these two artists, seemingly so distinct in time and practice, oscillate together in a shared space between functionality and poetry, between authoritarianism and freedom.
He explored geometric abstraction, chromatic relationships, and the interaction between lines and smooth surfaces, developing a theory of color and plane in the late 1950s.
