Kohn Gallery is delighted to announce its second solo exhibition of Israeli-born
New York-based artist Nir Hod. In 100 Years Is Not Enough, Hod’s artistic practice
draws upon personal memory and traumatic historical events to elicit subtle tensions
between the viewer’s expectations and the material reality of the
painting’s surface. The title of the exhibition, 100 Years Is Not Enough, is taken from
Hod’s naturalistic group of floral landscapes which employ similar elements from his
distinct chromed, abstract canvases.
These new works present a masterful play between the profoundly illusionistic depth
of the chromed, mirror-like surface that reflects the viewer and their surroundings, and
the physical substance of the painting evidenced by the oil painted brushstrokes
surrounding the chrome. The effect has an extraordinary impact precisely because of the
two competing, yet completely compatible, major shifts in painterly perspective.
Hod’s notable chrome and oil paint canvas series, The Life We Left Behind, returns; this
time informed by the larger context of the artist’s 20-year career. Hod applies a labor-
intensive chrome technique over washes of oil gradient underpainting. The canvases are
then carefully, sometimes brutally, manipulated by the application of ammonia, acids,
and air pressure. In these new paintings, the artist has transformed his reflective
canvases and by extension the viewer who—at the very moment of observation
becomes integral to the subject matter—into highly aestheticized bodies. The finished
paintings, with their vacillating pictorial depths of field, act as palimpsestic
archives of beauty amid destruction.
These elements are further expanded upon in Hod’s titular series, which he describes as
“a collage of nature.” The works appropriate and synthesize Claude Monet’s water lily
iconography into dream-like interpretations of flora and various bodies of water. Thick
impasto is layered over the chrome, taking upon the shimmering effect of sunlight on
water.
New sculptures expand upon Hod’s signature themes of decay and nostalgia. I Miss
You, a larger than life 14-foot sculpture composed of 2,000 melted Shabbat candles,
piles up Jewish mysticism, sexual undertones, and scattered emotional debris into a
monument of excess. Hod explains, “The candle represents memories, prayers, and
wishes; the wax of a single candle is amassed into a monolithic structure. It is the
transformation of something weak into something powerful.” Scratches of Butterfly
features a curved, marble hand acting as a pin cushion for the lethal needle of a delicate
butterfly specimen, capturing “human pain alongside the beauty and fragility of life and
the romanticism of two opposites coexisting.”
Each part of the exhibition flows into the other, as a glimpse into the past and a glance
towards the future. To look at one of Hod’s paintings is to be reminded of the
ephemerality of memory; how its construction and performance is ultimately malleable
and subjective. As Hod says: “It doesn’t matter if the story is precisely true…it’s about
you telling the story. It’s almost like going to a rock concert where the audience sings
along with the performer. I want the viewer’s experiences to be echoed in the work as
they are reflected back in the canvases.”
