Lior Modan

Hesse Flatow is pleased to present 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 fi guration and abstraction, combined with the textile’s light refl ecting and absorbing properties, creates a sense of movement that can be best described as holographic, ever-elusive and shift ing 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 shift ing between certainty and illusion.

Lior Modan’s (b. 1983, Tel Aviv) practice exists in constant slippage between distinct territories: painting and object, image and form, mundane and surreal. Modan received his MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University’s Sculpture + Extended Media program (2013). His work has been exhibited in venues domestically and abroad. Recent solo exhibitions were held at Dinner Gallery, New York (2025), CPM, Baltimore (2024), Make Room, Los Angeles (2021), Triumph, Chicago (2017), Golconda Gallery, Tel Aviv (2016), and Nurtureart, New York (2015). Selected group exhibitions include the Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art, Marinaro Gallery, New York, Peana Projects, Mexico, F2T Gallery, Milan, Italy; Harkawik Gallery, Los Angeles, Coustof Waxman Gallery, New York, WOAW Gallery, Hong Kong, and Haifa Museum, among others. His work was featured in various newspapers and magazines, such as The Observer, Architectural Digest, Timeout, Modern China, Hyperallergic, Wallpaper Magazine, and New City Arts. He lives and works in Queens, New York.