Nir Hod
100 Years Is Not Enough
Lot Closed
August 5, 06:23 PM GMT
Estimate
10,000 - 20,000 USD
Lot Details
Description
Nir Hod
b. 1970
100 Years Is Not Enough
Oil paint under and on top of chromed linen
16 by 12 in.
40.6 by 30.5 cm.
Executed in 2023.
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Kindly donated by Nir Hod and GAVLAK, Palm Beach
In 100 Years Is Not Enough, Nir Hod explores light on water, something he has never painted before, his underpainting sourced from a trove of images of lakes, ponds, gardens, and blooms. The title of the work is taken from Hod’s naturalistic group of floral landscapes which employ similar elements from his distinct chromed, abstract canvases. 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 work appropriates and synthesizes 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. Hod’s scene is more burdened, murkier, twisted, as always, Baudelairean fleurs du mal rather than sun-dazzled Impressionist landscapes. The painting arcs between abstraction and representation but favors the latter.
Chroming his canvases became a signature technique (first developed by the US Navy in 1939) about a decade ago when he accidentally discovered it while at a fabricator to chrome some sculptures. He was smitten by the sheen of the finished objects, which had the luster of Rembrandt, Velázquez, and other old masters that he was laboriously trying to replicate through painting, now unexpectedly resolved. 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. It is their reflective qualities that Hod zeroes in on, transforming an abstraction temporarily into a figurative painting by casting the image of the viewer into the work.
Nir Hod (born 1970) is an Israeli artist based in New York. Hod studied at Jerusalem's Bezalel Academy and New York's Cooper Union School of Art. He has exhibited internationally throughout the United States, Europe, Israel, and Japan. His most recent solo exhibitions include Echo of Memories, Kotaro Nukaga Gallery, Tokyo, Japan, Exile, Gavlak, Palm Beach, The Life We Left Behind, Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles, and Once Every Thing Was Much Better Even in the Future, at Paul Kasmin Gallery in New York. Hod’s work is included in the permanent collection at Tel Aviv Museum in Israel, and the Jewish Museum in New York.