Born in 1970, Nir Hod lives and works in New York.

Working across painting and highly reflective chromed surfaces, Hod explores the tension between glamour and violence, seduction and unease, beauty and power. His practice often draws on art history, luxury culture, political imagery, and collective memory, bringing these references into deliberately destabilized compositions. At the core of his work is a sustained interest in technical mastery and transformation: classical modes of painting are reworked through contemporary materials and narratives to produce images that are both alluring and unsettling.

Throughout his career, Hod has developed a distinctive visual language in which surface becomes a site of contradiction. Mirror-like finishes, rich painterly effects, and carefully staged motifs evoke desire, vanity, and status, while simultaneously pointing to loss, corruption, fragility, and historical violence. His works frequently challenge the viewer’s position, implicating them within the image through reflection, distortion, and proximity.

In the series The Life We Left Behind, Hod combines luminous underpaintings reminiscent of atmospheric landscape traditions with chrome-based techniques originally developed for industrial use. He then alters these polished surfaces through chemical and physical interventions, creating paintings that appear both pristine and deteriorated. The resulting works suggest shifting landscapes marked by beauty, erosion, and decay, while reflecting the viewer back into the composition.

This exploration continues in 100 Years Is Not Enough, a body of work inspired in part by Monet’s water lilies. Here, Hod layers thick impasto oil paint onto chromed surfaces, producing floating floral forms that hover between figuration and abstraction. Across these series, his work examines perception, memory, and self-image in a culture increasingly shaped by spectacle and mediation.