For the inaugural edition of Art Basel Qatar, Lehmann Maupin is pleased to present a solo presentation featuring new and recent work by New York-based artist Nari Ward. In a career spanning three decades, Ward has gained international recognition for his large-scale, mixed-media installations that use found and repurposed materials to explore themes of race, migration, identity, community, and consumer culture. The presentation brings together a series of signature works by the artist, including: new copper panel works, a new wall-based piece from the artist’s shoelace series, and a large-scale floor installation. Concurrent to Art Basel Qatar, Ward’s work is featured prominently in a number of biennials around the world, including in India and Taiwan. The presentation also comes on the heels of Ward’s major retrospective exhibition Ground Break at Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan, Italy in 2023.
Combining materials to re-contextualize their original meanings, Ward’s assemblages probe a range of spiritual and conceptual issues through literal and metaphorical juxtaposition. The presentation in Qatar will foreground a large-scale installation featuring two sculptures. Balance Fountain (2013—2014) recalls a wheelbarrow overflowing with mysterious cargo. Strands of silver shade cloth, oversized golden mango seeds, and long metal window balances exceed the confines of an antique barrel. Freed from their functional context, Ward’s window balances suggest an array of metaphorical resonances. If a window is used to see, then a window balance is a purveyor of vision. The work sits atop a floor installation titled Groundin’ Visible (2023), which is composed of bricks overlaid with a sheet of copper. Ward has long been drawn to copper as an artistic medium for both its energetic properties and its many cultural associations with medicine and healing. Together, these two works explore the restorative possibilities of communal gathering.
The presentation will also highlight PRAISEWORTHY (2025), a new work from Ward’s ongoing shoelace series, marking the artwork’s public debut. Among his most recognizable and celebrated works, Ward’s shoelace installations involve large-scale wall text or symbols created by threading and weaving hundreds or thousands of multi-colored shoelaces into the wall. In PRAISEWORTHY, the artwork’s title forms a text-based mediation on value and belief. By collapsing the sacred and the secular, Ward suggests that praise itself is an act of power—that what we choose to venerate gains value through the acts of attention and belief. Working with vernacular and found materials lends Ward’s work the ability to tap into mystery, memory, and emotion. Through their universal familiarity, the shoelaces make general reference to an anonymous mass of people, becoming metaphors for individual lives woven into a collective experience. The audience’s familiarity with this material is tantamount, as Ward prioritizes the experience of the viewer and their ability to find a personal entry point. Additionally, by giving shape and form to language, Ward stages a physical and phenomenological experience of text. As the distance between the viewer and the work increases or decreases, so too does the legibility of the text. This generates a physical experience where the viewer becomes aware of their spatial relationship to the work, mirroring the influence that the past bears on the present.
A new copper panel piece titled Watchlight (2025) will debut at the fair, alongside a number of copper panel works from the artist’s Still Livin’ series. Harnessing the process of oxidation as a tool for mark-making, Ward etches and marks the copper surfaces with everyday materials found around Harlem, New York, his longtime neighborhood. The Still Livin’ panels recall the work of Giorgio Morandi and the art historical tradition of still life painting, utilizing inanimate objects to formally and technically experiment with overall composition. In Watchlight (2025), Ward employs the image of a cell phone to probe the tension between connection and intrusion in contemporary life. Cell phones function simultaneously as instruments of witnessing and documentation and as potent symbols of surveillance, capable of gaining or granting access to private spaces. Materially specific yet conceptually open, Ward’s copper panels combine material experimentation with deep social insight, inviting multiple interpretations from the viewer.
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