Artists: Pablo Picasso - Joan Miró - Wassily Kandinsky - Juan Gris - Raoul Dufy - Jean Dubuffet - Alexander Calder - Georges Braque

Nahmad Projects presents Visual Symphonies, curated by internationally acclaimed musician and Grammy Award-winning artist Eve, who brings a performer’s finely tuned perspective to the exhibition. Music – intangible, deeply emotive, yet inherently structural – has long served as both inspiration and model for visual artists. From the Old Masters to the modern era, it has established itself as a universal language, conveyed through rhythm, harmony, tone and dissonance.

The exhibition explores the enduring relationship between two of the most powerful forms of expression: the visual and the auditory.

Focusing on the 20th century, Visual Symphonies brings together key works by Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, Wassily Kandinsky, Juan Gris, Raoul Dufy, Jean Dubuffet, Alexander Calder, and Georges Braque. Each piece reflects a distinct encounter between sound and image. Together the works create a free-flowing, polyphonic conversation, between the eye and the ear – surrounded by the very music that inspired these artists.

While music and visual art have long informed one another, the 20th century saw this relationship evolve, as both forms underwent simultaneous revolutions. Composers and artists began to break with tradition, embracing spontaneity and modernity. A new wave of classical music emerged alongside the rise of improvisational genres like jazz and blues. In parallel, advances in sound technology – radio, phonographs and recorded music – brought this evolving sonic world into artists’ studios, and into closer dialogue with visual art.

For the avant-garde, music offered an escape from narrative and figuration, opening new ways to express rhythm, mood and abstraction. The works presented reflect both literal and conceptual approaches of these ideas: Alexander Calder evokes the ‘sound of silence’ in suspended sculptural form, his mobiles become instruments played by the currents of air, stirring up a three-dimensional score. Wassily Kandinsky maps sound through synaesthesia, composing a visual symphony in colour and shape; Georges Braque, meanwhile, creates a Cubist perspective on instrument and player, echoing the contrapuntal, shifting nature of Bach’s musical compositions.

Visual Symphonies reaffirms that artistic expression is never confined by medium, but always in conversation—fluid, overlapping and in constant motion. Eve’s curation finds harmony and discord, cadence and pause, in the visual forms, reminding us that art, like music, is not only seen or heard—it is felt. This is a space where sound and image converge: a visual symphony in which the eye listens as much as it sees.