Bread and Magic

HESSE FLATOW is pleased to announce the opening of Bread and Magic, an exhibition by New York-based artist Lior Modan, marking his first-solo presentation with the gallery. Known for his low-relief, velvet encased paintings that reimagine household objects into uncanny still lifes, Modan approaches image-making through a sculptural lens, foregrounding its material and tactile qualities. Building his surfaces out of traditional materials such as foam, plaster, cardboard, and wood, his forms undergo a compression once enshrouded in velvet, before precipitating back into view through embossed detailing and highlights. This slippage between figuration and abstraction, combined with the textile's light reflecting and absorbing properties, creates a sense of movement that can be best described as holographic, ever-elusive and shifting relative to the viewer's position around the work. The pretense of a stage set or the sleight of a magic trick casts a quiet theatricality across the works in Bread and Magic. Consumed only through the eye, any sense of touch or physical truth must be conjured through belief and imagination. Within this suspended space, Modan explores the fragility of images, testing how they toggle and transform. A mobile constructed from playing cards and slices of bread suspends like a chandelier in Lighting and Unlighting. Its golden fibers glisten and scintillate as if turning a light switch on and off. Here, bread — an emblem of sustenance and necessity — is placed alongside playing cards symbolizing chance and fate. Their shared forms hint at an uneasy interchangeability — at one moment, they synchronize; at the next, they scatter — the image shifting between certainty and illusion.