Exhibition Walkthrough: Dinner Gallery with Lior Modan

Join Dinner Gallery for an intimate conversation with artist Lior Modan about the inspiration and creative process behind the new series of works in his solo exhibition, “The Foundations.” Please RSVP to reserve your spot.

Expanding upon his investigation into the instability of images, Modan’s new series of low relief velvet paintings focus on intangible moments and feelings. His works vibrate between real and imagined, consisting of fictional spaces, borrowed imagery and snapshots of daily life.

For Modan, materiality dictates form and has a way of concealing as much as revealing. He carefully builds his surfaces using utilitarian materials such as wood, foam, plaster and sand before vacuum sealing them with velvet. The scintillation and fluidity of velvet provides continually shifting and holographic fluctuations that test our perception. In addition, observations of ethereal events such as smoke, light and wind, are palpable within his scenes.

Included in “The Foundations” are several of Modan’s “undone plays”. The artist often describes his compositions as stills of plays that don’t exist. They are theatrical, but not theatre, and removed from context. In this way, Modan is constantly obscuring, reshaping and, quite literally, rebuilding significance creating space for a more open interpretation of experience based knowledge. He uses set design as an allegory for making a painting while challenging one’s understanding of the immediate world.

Embracing many dualities and liminal spaces, Modan’s works embody everything and nothing at the same time. They evade definitive interpretations and embrace ambiguity and transience, leading to a transformative experience that encourages the ongoing process of negotiation and exploration.