Fondation CAB Saint-Paul de Vence presents a dialogue between Nassos Daphnis and Rita McBride
Abstract Constructions
Nassos Daphnis - Rita McBride
March 15 to October 25, 2026
Fondation CAB Saint-Paul de Vence
Opening: Saturday March 14, 5pm-9pm
For its upcoming exhibition, Fondation CAB in Saint-Paul de Vence brings together two American artists from different generations: Nassos Daphnis (1914, Greece – 2010, United States), a key historical figure and pioneer of Hard-Edge Painting, last exhibited in France in 1962 at Galerie Iris Clert in Paris, and Rita McBride (b. 1960, United States), a contemporary artist firmly established on the European art scene.
Curated by Gregory Lang, Abstract Constructions presents a carefully selected group of works that guide visitors through a spatial form of abstraction situated between structure, surface, and architecture.
The exhibition juxtaposes Daphnis’s paintings—characterised by expansive planes of colour from different periods of his career—with McBride’s sculptures, installations, and architectural models. Linear elements and directional cues are integrated throughout the spaces of the Fondation, creating an immersive and dynamic experience.
On both a physical and conceptual level, the exhibition reveals how lines—rendered in two dimensions in Daphnis’s paintings and translated into three-dimensional spatial structures in McBride’s work—shape perception and orient movement. In doing so, the exhibition explores how art can influence behaviour, perception, and social interaction. Together, the works form a “crossed trajectory” through the exhibition space: Daphnis’s lines operate as an intangible visual grid, while McBride’s works function as bodily and interactive guides.
Bringing together two practices that at first glance appear distant in time and method, Abstract Constructions opens up a shared space that oscillates between functionality and poetry, authority and freedom.
Nassos Daphnis 64 69 , 1969, Enamel On Canvas, 242 X 242 Cm Copyright And Courtesy Estate Of Nassos Daphnis And Richard Taittinger Gallery
Nassos Daphnis City Wall #1 , Madison Square Park, Madison Avenue & 26th Street, New York, Sept, 1969 Copyright And Courtesy Estate Of Nassos Daphnis And Richard Taittinger Gallery
Nassos Daphnis
Nassos Daphnis (1914–2010) was an American painter and sculptor of Greek origin, renowned for his mastery of geometric abstraction and his pioneering role in the development of American Hard-Edge Painting. In 1958, he formulated his own Color and Plan Theory, investigating chromatic relationships and the interaction between line and smooth surface.
Based in New York, Daphnis was a trailblazer across multiple media and techniques, including tape painting, magna painting (from 1958), Plexiglas sculpture (1962), epoxy painting (1966), large-scale wall murals (from 1969), and computer-generated works (from 1985).
The Leo Castelli Gallery presented seventeen solo exhibitions of his work and included him in twenty-three group exhibitions between 1958 and 1998. His works are held in major museum collections worldwide, including the Guggenheim, the Whitney Museum of American Art, MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), the Albright-Knox Art Gallery (Buffalo), the Hirshhorn Museum (Washington, D.C.), the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, and the Basil & Elise Goulandris Foundation (Athens).
Daphnis was also a leading figure in public art. He created monumental outdoor murals in New York—most notably in Madison Square Park (1969), along the West Side Highway (1971), and in Times Square (1972), one of which was recently reconstructed in Athens (2023). In 1967, he co-founded City Walls, a precursor to the Public Art Fund, dedicated to revitalising New York’s visual environment through ambitious public art projects developed in close collaboration with artists and local communities.
The Estate of Nassos Daphnis has been represented by Richard Taittinger Gallery since 2015.
Rita McBride
Rita McBride (b. 1960) is an American conceptual artist whose work uses abstraction to examine inherited ideas of form, function, and material, drawing on modernist architecture, urban infrastructure, and industrial design. Her sculptures, installations, and objects—often made from unconventional materials and realised at unexpected scales—reconstruct familiar elements of the built environment. Once placed within specific contexts, her works question the functional distinctions between museum spaces, domestic interiors, and the public realm.
McBride lives and works between Los Angeles and Düsseldorf. She studied at Bard College in New York before completing her MFA at the California Institute of the Arts in 1987, where she studied with Michael Asher and John Baldessari. From 2003 to 2025, she taught at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and served as its director from 2013 to 2017. Her practice emerged in the postmodern period, at a moment when the political and aesthetic utopias of the 1960s had largely dissipated.
Since the 1990s, McBride’s primarily sculptural work—often expanding into architectural dimensions—has been widely exhibited and collected by major institutions in North America and Europe, including MoMA, LACMA, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Museum Ludwig (Cologne), Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen (Düsseldorf), De Pont Museum (Tilburg), Kunsthaus Zürich, MACBA (Barcelona), and Museu de Serralves (Porto), as well as numerous FRAC collections in France.
Her solo exhibitions include presentations at Witte de With (Rotterdam), the Wiener Secession (Vienna), IAC Villeurbanne, SculptureCenter (New York), Museum Abteiberg (Mönchengladbach), MACBA, Museo Tamayo (Mexico City), Dia Chelsea and Dia Beacon (New York), WIELS (Brussels), and the Hammer Museum (Los Angeles).
In parallel, McBride has realised numerous public sculptures conceived as spaces of participation, such as Arena (Salford), Obelisk (Essen), and Mae West (Munich). These works function simultaneously as monuments and as sites for gathering and encounter.
Rita McBride is represented by Mai 36 (Zurich), Konrad Fischer Galerie (Düsseldorf / Berlin / Los Angeles), CarrerasMugica (Bilbao), and Alfonso Artiaco (Naples).