Slideshow: Nir Hod’s Cigarette-Smoking Child Geniuses

Image by Courtesy Paul Kasmin Gallery

By Ezra Glinter June 14, 2011

In “Genius,” the current exhibit by Israeli artist Nir Hod at New York’s Paul Kasmin Gallery, pouty, fat-cheeked little boys glare out at the viewer, lit cigarettes dangling insolently from their sausage-like fingers. The series of more than 50 paintings, on view until June 18, is the latest installment in Hod’s growing body of arresting, lurid, and occasionally grotesque artworks.

The Tel Aviv-born painter, photographer, poet and video artist, currently based in New York, came to prominence in Israel in the 1990s with “Forever,” an exhibit and book featuring campy, exaggeratedly glamorous images of Israeli soldiers. Hod began painting the current series three years ago, at first as a side project, but eventually as a more concerted undertaking.

As it’s title suggests, the subjects of “Genius” are precocious and often creepy-looking children behaving provocatively like adults. They are dressed in elegant outfits and sport elaborate hair-dos that are obviously dated but whose period is difficult to pin down. Between their clothes and their dismissive facial expressions these little “geniuses” suggest the corrupting and destructive effects of privilege on the young. Both seductive and repulsive, their sad glamour and insistent sophistication seem to mask a deeper vulnerability.

Ezra Glinter is the critic-at-large of the Forward.

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