Uri Aran

Uri Aran's work is at once deeply idiosyncratic and oddly familiar: to follow it is to tinker alongside the artist, to be let in on an invention, or perhaps a shorthand between friends. Drawing on the stuff of everyday life—doodles, passport photos, kitschy keepsakes, the materials of a workshop—he turns a private vocabulary public, addressed to a room of strangers. Through repetition and arrangement, quotation and misalignment, ordinary things take on the air of personas, or characters, acquiring an artifice of meaning that is tender and elusive, or, in the artist's words, "sentimental despite myself." Aran's first major institutional solo exhibition in the United States gathers a new body of work: annotated panels that hover between quick line drawing and painting, welded sculptures that pose like equations, bulbous forms worked by hand in plasticene and foam, and a mass of piled-up googly eyes—the most elementary form of affect and animation—tragicomically raised to the scale of an earthwork.