Aziz art May 2018

Adi Nes
Born 1966
Life and career
Adi Nes was born in Kiryat Gat.
His parents are Jewish immigrants
from Iran.
Nes is notable for series "Soldiers",
in which he mixes masculinity and
homoerotic sexuality, depicting
Israeli soldiers in a fragile way. In
2003 he did a feature for Vogue
Hommes. Nes has given solo
exhibitions at the Wexner Center
for the Arts, Legion of Honor in
San Francisco, the
Tel Aviv Museum of Art, the
Museum of Contemporary Art in
San Diego, and the Melkweg
Gallery in Amsterdam, among
others. His work has also shown in
group exhibitions at the Hotel de
Sully in Paris, Haifa Museum of Art
and the Jewish Museum in New
York, among many others. He has
been reviewed in The New York
Times, the Financial Times, and
others. In 2005 Nes was
chosen as an outstanding artist of
the prestigious Israel Cultural
Excellence Foundation.
Nes' most famous piece recalls
Leonardo da Vinci's The Last
Supper, * replacing the characters
with young male Israeli soldiers. A
print sold at auction in Sotheby's
for $102,000 in 2005, and another
for $264,000 in 2007. The work
appeared on the front page of the
New York Times in May, 2008.
Nes' early work has been
characterized as subverting the
stereotype of the masculine Israeli
man by using homoeroticism and
sleeping, vulnerable figures.
He regularly uses dark-skinned
Israeli models.The models' poses
often evoke the Baroque period.
Nes has said that the inspiration for
his photography is partially
autobiographical:
“My staged photographs are
oversized and often recall wellknown
scenes from Art History and
Western Civilization combined with
personal experiences based on my
life as a gay youth growing up in a
small town on the periphery of
Israeli society. ”
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