Tel Avivian by birth, and breeding, Lior Modan lives and works in New York City. With a new solo show, ’Wild Rice’, he’s coming home for his first comprehensive showing in Israel, at Tel Aviv’s ex-tahini factory-turned-gallery Contemporary by Golconda.
’As a contemporary artist who is also an immigrant, I am always hovering over a place of non-belonging like an astronaut’, said Modan. In this latest show, the works, enigmatic and surprising, find their own worthy sense of place as large-scale deliveries. Often hard to define, the work, according to Modan, is a ’Compost Concert’ – presenting various attempts to form a bridge between the image and the painted surface. ’I feel that the works share a physical instability that keep them morphing as you spend more time with them,’ he explains.
In Sweat the W, a frozen, ginger mattress leaves its mark inside a rosy, summery painting. Lugete Veneres poses a quote from Ezra Pound’s Hellenistic poetry on canvas with a sample of families of penguins, Marc Jacobs design, torches and even pipes. As for Blue Velvet, dancers revolve over the artist’s face with a surprising mountain view. ’I appreciate,’ Modan explains, ’that odd characteristic of artworks constantly changing in their search for a new audience.’
