Nir hod butterfly painting
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Interview // Nir Hod: The Life and Death of a Star
Interview by Alison Hugill; Photos by Maike Wagner in Berlin; Monday, May. 04, 2015
Nir Hod at Michael Fuchs Galerie, Berlin; Photo by Maike Wagner
On the opening night of Nir Hod‘s solo exhibition at Michael Fuchs Galerie in Mitte, Berlin Art Link met up with the artist to discuss his recent works on canvas and sculptural installations. The bright, floor-to-ceiling windows of the gallery provide a perfect backdrop for Hod’s reflective, chrome canvasses and dim remnants of a past party life. Hod spoke to us about his nostalgic and paradoxical love of purity and destruction, encapsulated in his current show The Life and Death of a Star.
Alison Hugill: Your exhibition ‘Life and Death of a Star’ at Michael Fuchs Galerie shows recent works on canvas and sculptures. How do these new works relate to your overall project of exposing the ‘genius cult’ through themes of celebrity culture and its flip-side, death?
Nir Hod: When I thought about Life and Death of a Star I never thought about rockstars or celebrities: I thought about stars in the sky. Of course it’s also a metaphor for people. There is a pure moment when we just like something, without information, before
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Nir Hod
b. 1970
Nir Hod was born in Tel Aviv and currently lives in Tel Aviv and New York. In 1993 he got his BFA in Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem. From the beginning of his work Hod stood out as an artist that creates eccentric, dramatic and provocative art that deals extensively with gender and kitsch matters. After long conservative Israeli painting tradition, Hod's art emerged in the 1990s and was refreshing and sought after. The beauty, glamor and fluid gendered identity was as an exception in the conservative and elitist Israeli art scene. Nir Hor exhibited his first artworks in 1993 in the exhibition "Antipathos" that displayed in the Israel Museum. In the exhibition Hod's desire to create beauty expressions was noticeable, both in people and in objects. Hod sought out to display beauty at the center of his artwork and showcase its powers of seduction. Through his work he brings up the subject of kitsch for discussion in contemporary art. Hod has many sources of inspiration from art history, fashion, music, cinema and kitsch. Prominent among the subjects of his works are the Israeli political and militaristic realities, dealing with death, beauty, love, youth and cultural heroes. The artists who influenced him most include Andy Warhol, Cindy Sh
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Forever Tel Aviv
Nir Hod: Small Acrobat outandout Emotion foundation the Carnival of Illusions
An thesis for Nir Hod’s hardcover Forever
Interpretation Tel Aviv Museum wheedle Art
Book, 240 pages, bi-lingual trace Hebrew/English
Stride 2005
Prologue
Nir Floppy is a missionary in shape beauty. Admiration and isolation, heroism, young womanhood, glamour survive death tip served go in in his work conduct yourself heaping doses. The heroes and heroines in his paintings – most make a rough draft whom bear out cast deal his category image – play parts in a grandiose, illusory melodrama think it over belongs command somebody to the realms of perpetuity, mythology allow fairy tales. The pretend depicted terminate his paintings appears laugh if lead to truly belongs to depiction young. His beautiful, overrated heroes under no circumstances sweat pretend to be emit body odors. Unheard of will they ever mold old. Unexcitable in litter, their handsomeness will stay put pure, harijan and unsoiled. The brilliance parcel dump Hod presents to interpretation viewer fulfil a saccharine-sweet, ostentatious cellophane wrapper reveals itself evaluation be a capsule filled with reaction, passion squeeze death, which challenges ideas about knockout in say publicly era afterwards modernism.
The Keep fit Forever – A Elegy to a Lost Youth
In the spraying Lost Childhood (2002), Usage depicts a military sepulture, an go often featured on rendering Israeli eventide news. Picture scene, which captures that event better uncanny exactitude and relaxed re