Nessim Bassan: The Unimaginable Worlds of Perfection

New York—Nessim Bassan: The Unimaginable Worlds of Perfection opens at Nohra Haime Gallery on November 9, where it will be on view until December 11, 2023. The exhibition brings together 18 works from the past three years.

Nessim Bassan: The Unimaginable Worlds of Perfection showcases the artist’s engagement with kinetic art, as his preoccupation with geometric abstraction enacted through mixed media. Bassan’s approach is at once a personal exploration of form and a reflection on objective mathematical measurements. The artist tends to work with a color palette of variations of white, to which he might add flashes of color. Incorporating media such as paint, wood, linen, paper, and string into his art, Bassan interweaves textures in a way that produces a myriad of layers.

Even with this complexity of detail and physical depth, these works do not convey disorganization but rather, precision and balance. They are optical illusions at once simple and complex, delicate and bold, elegant and unrestrained. Born in Panamá, where he lives and works, Bassan has been a practicing artist for over five decades.

His earliest work was recognized and promoted by critics and curators, notably such as Thomas Messer from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Lester Cooke from National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. In 1970, Jose Gomez-Sicre, invited him to exhibit at the Organization of American States in Washington DC, which led to his participation in the 1981 Sao Paulo Biennial. Following this exhibition, Bassan chose to leave the art world for almost twenty years, returning to exhibiting in the late 1990s. Through his career, he has participated in solo and group exhibitions around the world, including in Brazil, Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and the United States. An extensive formal retrospective of Bassan’s works is currently traveling across Central America, having begun at the Contemporary Art Museum in Panamá in November 2022, before moving to the National Identity Museum of Honduras, The Museum of Art of El Salvador and the Museum of Modern Art Carlos Mérida in Guatemala.