Adi Nes - Photographs New York Wednesday, April 4, 2012 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Acquired directly from the artist

  • Exhibited

    Composed: Identity, Politics, Sex, The Jewish Museum, New York, 22 December 2011- 30 June 2012, anotherprint exhibited

  • Literature

    Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Exposure: Recent Acquisitions: The Doron Sebbag Art Collection, O.R.S. Ltd., pl. 45

  • Catalogue Essay

    Throughout his career Adi Nes has been appropriating and restaging images culled from Italian Renaissance, European Judaica, Greek mythology, American photojournalism, and as seen in the current lot, Classical sculpture. By doing so, Nes subverts the principles underpinning the formation of nationalist and masculine identities. The current lot depicts a young, shirtless man flexing his muscles. His pants, boots, dog tag and the tent identify him as a soldier, while the yarmulke on his head identifies him as Jewish. Thereby, Nes presents a Postmodern rebuttal to the 19th-century stereotyping of young Jewish men as “shtetl Jews”—studious, weak and craven. However, the Classical pose, the Romantic sky, the exaggerated lighting and the narcissistic self-adoration all allude to the artificiality belying the scene, consequently dispelling notions of what constitutes the age-old clichés of masculinity and religion.

    Another print of this image is in the collection of The Israel Museum, Jerusalem.

139

Untitled from The Soldiers

1996
Color coupler print, printed 1998.
24 1/2 x 23 1/2 in. (62.2 x 59.7 cm)
Signed, titled, dated and numbered 2/3 in ink on the verso; signed, titled, dated and numbered 2/3 in ink on a label affixed to the reverse of the frame.

Estimate
$18,000 - 22,000 

Contact Specialist
Vanessa Kramer Hallett
Worldwide Head of Photographs
vhallett@phillips.com
+ 1 212 940 1245

Photographs

4 April 2012
New York