Paul Kasmin Gallery is pleased to announce Once Everything Was Much Better Even The Future, a solo exhibition of painting and sculpture by Nir Hod, on view September 11 – October 25, 2014 at 515 West 27th Street, New York. Once Everything Was Much Better Even The Future features his monumental sculptural work of the same name, a snow globe containing a moving scale model of a pumpjack encased in oil and swirling “snow” comprised of gold-colored flakes, a reflection of the immense wealth generated by the oil trade. Hod’s globe encompasses an idealized, isolated landscape of oil extraction in which production and consumption can peacefully coexist. Once Everything Was Much Better Even The Future exemplifies the artist’s practice of pushing the boundaries of juxtaposition, his careful appropriation of historical styles, and imagery querying the fine line between life and death.
Characteristic of Hod’s work is a dark glamour that is both alluring and menacing, exemplified in his three new series of paintings. In I Want Always to be Remembered in Your Heart, smoldering flames are superimposed on delicate flowers, alluding to the paradoxical coexistence of beauty and destruction. Through a chroming process he transforms matte canvases into reflective, mirrored surfaces in the series All We Wish For, Let it Be and The Back Room. In All We Wish For, Let it Be, the artist renders ethereal clouds and shattered glass, alluding to a cycle of destruction and rebirth. The Back Room presents contrasting black and white scratches upon chrome surfaces emanating light. Both works underline the artist’s pursuit of the sublime as a place of pleasurable fear and forbidden desire.
The exhibition at Paul Kasmin Gallery’s 293 Tenth Avenue location, on view September 10 – October 25, 2014.
Nir Hod’s sculpture Once Everything Was Much Better Even The Future consists of a moving scale model of an oil pump jack encased within a large globe of oil. The piece alludes to the nostalgic scenes often depicted in snow globes. In Hod’s globe, the viewer is presented with an idealized, isolated landscape of oil extraction – a world suspended in time, where the contradictions inherent in oil production and consumption can peacefully coexist. This calming effect is precipitated by the slow movement of the pump jack and the swirling “snow” which is comprised of flakes of 24 carat gold, a reflection of the immense wealth generated by the oil trade. The world inside the globe is one stripped of political and ethical concerns, a world without military conflicts or environmental destruction. Once Everything Was Much Better Even The Futureportrays a romanticized version of reality enclosed in glass, as fragile and precarious as the future of a world powered by oil.
