Nir Hod

In his videos, sculptures and realist paintings, Nir Hod creates luxuriously stylized worlds of beauty, loneliness, glamour and death.  As Richard Vine wrote in the catalogue for Hod’s survey exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, “From the beginning of his career, Nir Hod has opposed the ideology that labels sumptuousness an esthetic sin.  His work openly substitutes the pleasure principle and a fluid multiplicity of selves for the old notions of high seriousness and personal authenticity.” In his series of “Genius” paintings and sculptures, Hod depicted aristocratic young men and women whose cherubic cheeks contrast with their scornful expressions and smoldering cigarettes. For his series “Mother,” Hod created paintings that reference an iconic photograph, taken by the Nazi photographer Franz Konrad, of Nazi soldiers clearing out the Warsaw Ghetto during the Second World War.  Although most of the scholarship and speculation about this photograph has centered on the identity of the young boy with his arms raised, Hod’s paintings focus on the woman in profile closest to the photographer.  By removing this faceless and often overlooked woman from the historical context of the original photograph, he asks the viewer to consider who she was and to imagine the life that she could have had. 

Hod has had solo shows at a number of galleries including Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv, Jack Shainman Gallery, New York, The Museum of Israeli Art, Ramat Gan, Israel, and Davide Gallo Gallery , Berlin.

Courtesy of Paul Kasmin Gallery