Nir Hod: Dorian's Garden at the Michael Kohn Gallery
- LA Art Documents
- Nov 10
- 2 min read
Nir Hod
Dorian's Garden
Michael Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
October 11, 2025 - January 2026
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.
