Lawrie Shabibi
Skip to main content
  • Menu
  • Artists
  • Exhibitions
  • Art Fairs
  • News
  • Public Art
  • Viewing Room
  • Videos
  • Publications
  • Press
  • About Us
  • Careers
  • Store
Cart
0 items $
Checkout

Item added to cart

View cart & checkout
Continue shopping
Menu

Frieze Masters, 2024: Spotlight | Nabil Nahas

Regent's Park, London, UK, 9 - 13 October 2024 
Open a larger version of the following image in a popup: Installation shot of Lawrie Shabibi Frieze Masters Booth. Photography by Will Amlot.
Installation shot of Lawrie Shabibi Frieze Masters Booth. Photography by Will Amlot.
Event logo S27 | Spotlight
Lawrie Shabibi is pleased to announce its second participation in Frieze Masters, held in The Regent’s Park, London, 9-13 October 2024. This year we present three monumental panels by Nabil Nahas that were on long loan to the Yale Chemistry Department from1973 whilst Nahas was a student at Yale completing his MFA. Only ever on view at Yale, this is the first time these seminal works will be seen by a broader public. 

 

Nabil Nahas was unusual amongst young Lebanese painters of the late 1960s and early 1970s, travelling to the United States in 1968 for his training rather than Paris. The early experiences he had there, especially his time at Yale studying for his MFA at the start of the 1970s informed much of his subsequent work. There Nahas encountered many of the most prominent contemporary artists of the time, but it was Al Held who was teaching at Yale University at the time that became Nahas’s mentor.

 

Emblematic of Nahas’ period of geometric abstraction, which was to continue into the early 1980s, these works show the scale and ambition of Nahas at an early stage in his career and predate by four years those shown in his first gallery solo exhibition at Robert Miller in 1978. Presented alongside two striking abstract paintings from 1978 — the same year and series as one currently on view at Tate Modern — the works show both the influence of Al Held as well as the brutalist architecture of Paul Rudolph's masterpiece, the Yale School of Architecture. They also demonstrate how, as a student, Nahas moved beyond the relative clarity of the older painter to explore the complexities of Islamic geometry.

 

In America at that time, these paintings must have appeared quite radical: the critic Clement Greenburg’s theories of painting were still current orthodoxy - that progressive painting was about emphasis on two dimensionality of the surface. Nahas, already making drawings of geometric patterns in the late 1960s and 1970s, was encouraged by Al Held, who at that time was filling his canvases with rings, cubes and three-dimensional discs. However, there was always a difference: whilst in Held’s work complexity comes from the incompatible perspectives his simple forms imply, Nahas was looking towards Islamic art and its tessellated ceramics patterns, seeking to expand these into a three dimensional set-up like honeycomb.  The overlapping geometric systems of Nahas’ paintings, with their emphasis on optical mixture and the dematerialization of the surface, diverge markedly from the contemporary works of both Held and Stella. Nahas’ use of geometry was less recognizable, as the abstractions of these paintings do not feel so much like geometry as decorative motifs from the pantheon of Islamic art imbued with an eerie luminosity.

 

With their linear structures and yellow ground, which Nahas used because he was searching not for physicality but intangible luminosity, his work caught the attention of the Harry Wasserman, Professor in the Chemistry Department and himself a keen amateur painter, and the panels were placed in the neo-Gothic lobby of Sterling Lab, the Chemistry Department at Yale University. Nahas says of the mechanical effect of these paintings “I didn’t want to feel the paint”. The artist’s hand was not to show.

 

These works are the forerunners of several of those in important international institutions, including those in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Tate Modern, and the Barjeel Art Foundation. A study on paper for these works is in the collection of the British Museum.

  • FIND OUT MORE
  • PRESS RELEASE

Related artist

  • Nabil Nahas

    Nabil Nahas

Share
  • Facebook
  • X
  • Pinterest
  • Tumblr
  • Email
Back to art fairs
Manage cookies
Copyright © 2025 LAWRIE SHABIBI
Site by Artlogic
Facebook, opens in a new tab.
Twitter, opens in a new tab.
Instagram, opens in a new tab.
Artsy, opens in a new tab.
Join the mailing list
Send an email
View on Google Maps
Ocula, opens in a new tab.

This website uses cookies
This site uses cookies to help make it more useful to you. Please contact us to find out more about our Cookie Policy.

Manage cookies
Accept

Cookie preferences

Check the boxes for the cookie categories you allow our site to use

Cookie options
Required for the website to function and cannot be disabled.
Improve your experience on the website by storing choices you make about how it should function.
Allow us to collect anonymous usage data in order to improve the experience on our website.
Allow us to identify our visitors so that we can offer personalised, targeted marketing.
Save preferences
Close

Join Mailing List

Thank you for signining up to Lawrie Shabibi.  Please note that at the moment we are not accepting any artist submissions. 

Interests *

Sign up

* denotes required fields

We will process the personal data you have supplied in accordance with our privacy policy (available on request). You can unsubscribe or change your preferences at any time by clicking the link in our emails.