Between Promise and Possibility

Works by contemporary Israeli photographer Adi Nes (b. 1965) will be featured at the Legion of Honor, in an exhibition that highlights 20 of the artist’s large-scale, meticulously staged and digitally manipulated color photographs. In 2001 Nes was the recipient of the Nathan Gottesdiener Foundation Prize for Israeli art, an award intended to encourage young talent and support an exhibition at a major museum.
Comprising a large portion of the Legion exhibition, is Nes’s fashion photography series, which appeared in the Fall/Winter 2003 issue of Vogue Hommes International. Nes’s fashion series, exhibited for the first time in the United States, after a showing at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, places models in a faux prison setting, drawing fashion into a social, political, and ideological critique, while exploring how the fashion industry packages images of desirability.
The exhibition also features a series of Nes’s photographs depicting contemporary life in Israel, particularly that of the heroic Israeli soldier. Nes’s photographs often reference classical and modern mythology and art history sources, combining these traditional references with a contemporary perspective that both illuminates and questions Israeli sociopolitical realities.
"Adi Nes’s photographs resonate with exquisite beauty through a combination of documentary drama and poetic idealism," said Dr. Daniell Cornell, Associate Curator for the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. "Made tangible by Nes’s personal interpretation of the heroic soldier, his cultural identity, and his identity as a gay Israeli," Cornell continued, "these photographic images are fused with an innocence and vulnerability --a theme Nes also pursues and develops in his images of adolescent boys."
In his series of photographs of adolescent boys and young men, Nes situates them in carefully constructed tableaus that emphasize the codes of "masculine identity," while at the same time challenges them. Set in locations throughout his native Israel, Nes’s Kiryat Gat photographs, while maintaining a strictness to detail, are charged with highly edgy, realistic situations, which exude an insight into human potential, perfection, and loss.

About the Artist
1965 Born in Kiryat Gat
1989-92 Photography studies (BFA) at the Bezalel Academy, Jerusalem


Awards
1999 Minister of Education, Culture and Sport Prize
2000 The Nathan Gottesdiener Foundation Israeli Art Prize, Tel Aviv Museum of Art


Solo Exhibitions
2000 Dvir Gallery, Tel Aviv
2001 "Recent Photographs", Tel Aviv Museum of Art
2002 Solo Exhibition, The Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego
"Adi Nes: Photographs", Museum of Contemporary Photography,
Columbia College, Chicago
2003 "Recent Photographs", Jack Shainman Gallery, New York
"Recent Photographs", Leon Constantiner Prize, Tel Aviv Museum
of Art