Jordan Nassar: Describing Clouds

Describing Clouds brings together new multi-panel embroidered landscapes and Smalti tile mosaics that continue Nassar’s engagement with the art and craft histories of the Levant. Across the exhibition, Nassar considers how images and techniques move through time as they are repeated, translated, fragmented, and reconfigured across centuries and continents.

This exhibition presents a new series of multi-panel embroideries that expand his distinctive engagement with Palestinian tatreez, a traditional form of cross-stitch embroidery most often found on pillows, clothing, and other domestic arts. Geometric panels—diamonds, squares, pentagons, and hexagons—combine patterned fields of repeating motifs with panels depicting imagined landscapes, where hills and horizons emerge through subtle changes in color. 

Designed to be installed in multiple configurations, the works look to the convertible etched-mirror sculptures of Iranian artist Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, which brought traditional Persian craft techniques and Islamic geometric patterning into dialogue with modern Abstraction and Minimalism. Nassar similarly engages modular structures: individual stitches accumulate into complex patterned landscapes, and distinct panels into larger compositions. While each of the thousands of stitches remain fixed, the relationships among the panels can be changed into different arrangements, allowing the landscapes to be continually reconfigured.

Adaptive and evolving, his works are rooted in a linguistic and geopolitical field of play characterized by both conflict and unspoken harmony. A large mosaic tile work, titled Jabalia, draws directly from the remains of a fifth-century Byzantine Christian church and monastery at Mukheitim, an archeological site in Gaza, excavated in 1997. The full extent of the damage to the site from Israeli bombardment since 2023 remains unknown. The remarkable mosaic floors depict animals, hunting scenes, palm trees, and geometric ornament. Reworking this imagery tessera by tessera, Nassar reconstructs leaping and grazing animals around a central palm, with passages of unexpected color that interrupt and elaborate on their simplified graphic design.

Parts come together and separate, are rearranged, isolated, and recombined. This sense of constant change echoes the exhibition’s title, Describing Clouds, borrowed from a poem by Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, in which clouds resist description as they continually gather, disperse, and re-form into something new. Ultimately the exhibition considers the transmission and construction of political and cultural narratives: how symbols, patterns, and materials can be modulated to preserve, study, and remake our understanding of history and heritage.

Describing Clouds forms a two-part presentation with The Third Line, on view at FRIEZE No. 9 Cork Street in London, which brings together a shared body of work across both galleries.

Jordan Nassar (b. 1985, New York, NY) earned his BA at Middlebury College. His work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions globally at institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston; Asia Society, New York, NY; Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, NJ; Museum of Arts and Design, New York, NY; Katonah Museum of Art, Katonah, NY; KMAC Museum, Louisville, KY; Center for Contemporary Art (CCA) Tel Aviv; Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles, CA; James Cohan Gallery, New York, NY; and The Third Line, Dubai, UAE.

Nassar’s work has been acquired by museum collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Dallas Art Museum, Dallas, TX; Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Buffalo, NY; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL; The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; and Rhode Island School of Design Museum, in Rhode Island, among others. A forthcoming solo exhibition at SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, GA will open in 2027. Nassar lives and works in New York, NY.