Nir Hod
It doesn’t matter if the story is precisely true…it’s about you telling the story. It’s almost like going to a rock concert where the audience sings along with the performer. I want the viewer’s experiences to be echoed in the work as they are reflected back in the canvases.
— Nir Hod
Selected Works
“The common hill-flowers wither, but they blossom again. The laburnum will be as yellow next June as it is now. In a month there will be purple stars on the clematis, and year after year the green night of its leaves will hold its purple stars. But we never get back our youth.”
– Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Michael Kohn Gallery is extremely proud to announce Dorian’s Gardens, an exhibition by New York-based artist Nir Hod. In his nearly 30-year career, Hod has consistently delved into the duality of human nature as subject matter for his paintings. The dichotomous themes of beauty and death, cycles of flourish and decay, vanity, perfection, destruction, and the overall fragility of life permeate from his earliest bodies of work, such as the Genius and Mother portraits, to his most recent, reflective minimal canvases of the series 100 Years is Not Enough. The ongoing study of various bodies of water is rendered by Hod’s loose yet seductive impressionistic style and iconic chroming, mirror-like technique.
100 Years…, consists of emotive gestural interpretations of flora floating over bodies of water. Partially idealized, they are not exact renditions of nature but impressions that hover between natural and representational beauty. Hod’s scattered mark-making is complemented by the illusion of shimmering water achieved by multiple applications of reflective metallic chrome. Each composition appears to create a singular ecosystem, a simulacrum of the natural world. Upon close inspection, the spectator finds their own likeness reflected in a painterly surface reminiscent of reality, a visual metaphor of vanity, illusion, and the human condition.
Appropriately titled after Oscar Wilde’s seminal novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, Hod’s new exhibition, Dorian’s Gardens, is visually exquisite but, like Dorian Gray’s portrait, the paintings ultimately betray their true nature through rough gestures, ghostly traces of color, and a myriad of painterly “mistakes” that proudly reveal beauty and decay as one. Together Hod’s group of lustrous, pastoral landscapes reimagine aesthetic perfection through a lush orchestration of exotic flowers, velvet petals slick with dew, manicured hedges, and sun-dappled pathways veiled in haze. Though, laying beneath the surface is an eerily quiet unrest– Hod’s symbolic reaping of the garden’s vitality. In the artist’s interpretation, Dorian’s Gardens is a suspension of transient bloom, a state of longing, of vanished innocence, and hidden truths. A florid world where splendor conceals grief, and perfection is a carefully painted mask.
Equally present in Dorian’s Gardens is Hod’s affinity for art history. A palatial ambiance that recalls Old Masters is achieved through color palettes of deep turquoises, jewel-toned reds, and purples melded with black and brown tones. The relaxed brushwork of Life as a Memory, a portrait of a couple taking a stroll, is a melancholic recall of poems and letters of loneliness. While Hod’s newest figurative sculpture, Lonely girl with tiger– evocative of the allegoric bronzes from the Renaissance–carries themes of desire.
Dorian’s Gardens opens October 11, 2025, and will be on view through January 2026.
About the Artist
Nir Hod lives and works in New York. He earned his BFA at Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem, and attended the Cooper Union School of Art in New York City in 1991. Hod has had several solo exhibitions in the United States and abroad with his first show in 1996 at Noga Gallery of Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv. Past and upcoming exhibitions include Patricia Low, Gstaad, Switzerland (2026); Kotaro Nukaga Ropponigi, Tokyo, Japan (2026); Dorian’s Gardens, Michael Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Nir Hod: I Don’t Want To Forget You, Gavlak, Palm Beach, FL; 100 Years is Not Enough, Michael Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Jack Shainman Gallery, New York, NY; Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York, NY; and Michael Fuchs Gallery, Berlin, Germany. His work has been in numerous group exhibitions nationally and internationally from New York to London, Berlin, Vienna, and Israel. These include the Tel Aviv Museum, Tel Aviv, Israel; The Museum of Israeli Art, Ramat Gan, Israel; Albright Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; The Jewish Historical Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands; Martin-Gropius-Bau Museum, Berlin, Germany; Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, NY; The Jewish Museum, New York, NY; The Vienna Jewish Museum, Vienna, Austria; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel; Yerba Buena Center for the Art, San Francisco, CA; Museum of Modern Art, Oostende, Belgium; The Flag Art Foundation, New York, NY; Marlborough Gallery, New York, NY; among others.