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, 6pm-9pm
For its upcoming exhibition, Fondation CAB in Saint-Paul-de-Vence brings together two American artists from different generations. 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 (b. 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).
Curated by Gregory Lang, Abstract Constructions, Nassos Daphnis - Rita McBride establishes an unprecedented formal and conceptual dialogue. He presents a carefully selected group works by the two artists that leads visitors through a spatial form of abstraction situated between structure, surface, and architecture. Linear elements and directional cues are integrated throughout the spaces of the Fondation, creating an immersive and dynamic experience for the visitors.
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.
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.
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Rita McBride Stratacolor , 2008 © Studio Rita McBride Courtesy The Artist And Mai 36 Galerie
Nassos Daphnis Exhibition View 1959 1963 American Pioneers Of Castelli Gallery – A Tribute To Nassos Daphnis , At Richard Taittinger Gallery, New York, 2017, Courtesy And Copyright The Nassos Daphnis Estate And Richard Taittinger Gallery, New York
Nassos Daphnis 65 69 , 1969, Enamel On Canvas, 242 X 242 Cm Copyright And Courtesy The Nassos Daphnis Estate And Richard Taittinger Gallery Jpg
Rita McBride Stratacolor , 2008 © Studio Rita McBride Courtesy The Artist And Mai 36 Galerie2
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Rita McBride Color Test (Checkered), 2009, Wool Tapestry, 181 X 251 Cm, Gesellschaft KunsthalleDuesseldorf © Artist Studio
Nassos Daphnis City Wall #1 , Madison Square Park, Madison Avenue & 26th Street, New York, Sept, 1969 Copyright And Courtesy The Nassos Daphnis Estate And Richard Taittinger GalleryNassos Daphnis
Nassos Daphnis, a Greek-born American painter and sculptor, is recognized for his mastery of geometric abstraction and his role as a precursor of the American Hard-Edge Painting movement and Minimal Art. In 1958, he formulated his own Color and Plane Theory, exploring chromatic relationships and the interaction between lines and smooth surfaces.
Nassos Daphnis (1914, Krokeia, Greece – 2010, Provincetown, Massachusetts, United States), who lived and worked in New York, was a pioneer in numerous pictorial fields: tape painting, Magna painting (1958), Plexiglas sculpture (1962), epoxy painting (1966), large-scale mural works (1969), and computer-generated works (1985).
The Leo Castelli Gallery devoted 17 solo exhibitions to him and included his work in 23 group exhibitions between 1958 and 1998. His last solo exhibition in France was in 1962 at the famous Galerie Iris Clert in Paris. His works are held in the collections of major museums (Guggenheim Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, MoMA, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Tel Aviv Museum of Art; Basil & Elise Goulandris Foundation, Athens), and have been widely exhibited, including at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (1952, 1970); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1959, 1967, 1969); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (1961); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (1962); Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo (1969); Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse (1969); La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (1982); and Boca Raton Museum of Art, Florida (1993).
Daphnis was also a leading figure in public art. He is the author of monumental outdoor murals in New York, including Madison Square Park (1969), West Side Highway (1971), and Times Square, Arlen Building (1972), one of which was recently recreated in Athens (2023). He was also one of the principal founders of City Walls Inc. in 1967, the precursor to the Public Art Fund. Through public art, the organization was dedicated to revitalizing New York City’s visual environment in collaboration with major artists and local communities.
The Nassos Daphnis Estate has been represented by Richard Taittinger Gallery, New York, since 2015.
Rita McBride
Rita McBride is an American conceptual artist whose practice employs abstraction to interrogate inherited notions of form, function, and material, drawing from modernist architecture, urban infrastructure, and industrial design. Through her sculptures, installations, and objects—crafted from unconventional materials and realized at unexpected scales—she reconstructs and stages familiar elements of the built environment. When inserted into specific contexts—whether museum spaces, domestic interiors, or the public realm—her works challenge the functional distinctions that traditionally define and differentiate these spheres, exposing their structural and symbolic roles.
Her cross-disciplinary practice also encompasses collaborative publications, editions, performances, large-scale works in public space, and online software (Are.na).
Rita McBride (1960, Des Moines, Iowa, United States) lives and works between Los Angeles and Düsseldorf. She studied at Bard College in New York before earning her MFA at the California Institute of the Arts in 1987, where she studied and worked with Michael Asher and John Baldessari. From 2003 to 2025, she taught at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, serving as its director from 2013 to 2017. She belongs to a generation of American artists whose practice emerged in the postmodern era, a period marked by the dissolution of the political and aesthetic utopias of the 1960s.
Her practice—primarily sculptural but often expanding into architectural dimensions—has been widely recognized since the 1990s. Her work is collected and exhibited in leading North American institutions, including the MoMA (New York), LACMA and Hammer Museum (Los Angeles), San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art (La Jolla), and Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), as well as major European venues such as the Museum Ludwig (Cologne), Bundeskunstsammlung Zeitgenössischer Kunst (Bonn), Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen (Düsseldorf), Museum Abteiberg (Mönchengladbach), De Pont Foundation for Contemporary Art (Tilburg), Kunsthaus (Zurich), MACBA (Barcelona), and Museu de Serralves (Porto). In France, her work is held in numerous FRAC collections (Bourgogne-Franche-Comté, Île-de-France, Pays de la Loire, Rhône-Alpes-Auvergne).
Her solo exhibitions include presentations at Witte de With, Rotterdam (1997); Wiener Secession, Vienna (2000); IAC, Villeurbanne (2002); Sculpture Center, Long Island City (2004); Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach (2008); MACBA (2012); Museo Tamayo, Mexico City (2013); Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (2014); Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (2015); Dia Chelsea, New York (2017); WIELS, Brussels (2017); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2023); and Dia Beacon (2023–2025).
In parallel, McBride has realized numerous public sculptures conceived as participatory spaces, functioning simultaneously as monuments and as sites for gathering and encounter. These include: Arena (1997–2002), Salford; Obelisk (2010), Emscher Canal, Essen; Mae West (2011), Munich; Bells and Whistles (2014), The New School, New York; Artifacts (C.W.D.) (2015), P.S. 315, Queens, New York; Particulates (2017), Dia Art Foundation, New York; and Obelisk of Tutankhamun (2017), Cologne.
Rita McBride is represented by galleries Alfonso Artiaco, Napoli; Carreras Mugica, Bilbao; Konrad Fischer, Düsseldorf–Berlin–Los Angeles; and Mai 36, Zurich.