At NADA Miami 2025, IAH presents I didn’t inhale, a solo presentation of paintings by Düsseldorf-based, Noah El Hachem (b.1998). The canvases face the viewer head-on: calm, frontal and slightly withholding, they hold you close to the surface in the brief pause before a breath. In that held interval, identity and desire register less as narrative than as pressure—the way forms are placed, repeated and kept at a measured distance.


El Hachem builds each work from a small set of shapes that have followed him since childhood. One of his earliest memories is of drawing a twisted, olive-tree-like trunk; it stayed on as a private alphabet. In the paintings this alphabet splits and recombines: a bent trunk slides between branch, bone and brace; broad, shield-like plates sit at chest height; smaller fragments hover between leaf, tool, bone and script; heads and eyes are pared down to near-icons rather than portraits. The works do not describe a body so much as stage how a body is held together—and held back—by this limited vocabulary.


A recurring blue ground presses the air into a flat plane where forms and viewer meet. It marks an in-between position shaped by his Lebanese upbringing in Germany, as the shapes move through calligraphic, organic and anatomical references without settling into any single code. From a distance the surfaces can read as smooth, almost airbrushed or digital; up close each gradient breaks down into slow, layered brushwork. The title I didn’t inhale names this tension: each painting comes to the edge of recognition and stays there—present, direct, and slightly short of breath.