Hilla Toony Navok

Toony Navok creates installations that combine sculptural objects and colorful drawings: architectural-constructive environments with an airy, drawing-like nature that range from the abstract to the concrete.

Navok tracks high Modernism and abstraction in popular consumer products in a practice based on extraordinary constructs. She pits consumer and industrial products firmly within abstraction, voiding function.  The monumental yet fragile, linear constructed sculptures she forms are made of every-day practical objects and popular design elements, revealing their hidden abstract forms while glancing to canonical periods of art. Known for her playful sculptural use of vernacular materials (metal surfaces, pipes, aluminum poles, PVC fabric, cleaning and shelving units product), she investigates the very notion of display rather than simply present ready-mades.  With that, she examines the cultural and ideological underpinnings of design in the consumer production process, and the assimilation of the history of Modernism in contemporary consumer culture and our place within it.

Navok’s selected solo exhibitions include Circle 1 gallery, Berlin, Center of Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv, Haifa Museum of Art, Local_30 Gallery, Warsaw. Group exhibitions include the Ashdod Museum of Art, Monart Centre, Neues Museum in Weimar, Germany, Rosenfeld Gallery, Tel Aviv, Sommer Contemporary Art Gallery, Tel Aviv, Kring-Ernst Gallery, Cologne, Rockefeller Museum, Jerusalem. She exhibited a special solo project in Art Cologne, Germany, as part of “New Positions,” ARTLV – the Tel Aviv Biennial, Herzliya Biennial of Contemporary Art. She has received several awards, including the Givon Prize for young artists from the Tel Aviv Museum of Art (2011), and the Creative Encouragement Award of the Israel Ministry of Culture & Sport (2012). Navok co-curated the second Herzliya Biennial of Contemporary Art (2009) and was co-editor of the art magazine Picnic Magazine (2011-2007). 

Courtesy of Noga Gallery