David Nipo: Evidence and Fabrication

Ashdod Art Museum proudly presents the work of David Nipo, one of the most impressive realist artists working today in Israel. Nipo belongs to a new generation of realist artists, and is forging a new path for local art. Israeli art has always drawn inspiration from faraway places, importing this influence and allowing it a local validity and context; Nipo finds his sources elsewhere, basing himself on the Classical tradition in art. His is an ongoing dialogue with the Great Masters, whom he sees as mentors and colleagues, and he is their disciple.

Evidence and Fabrication brings his works with their concomitant subject matter of self portraits, interiors and landscapes into the Israeli here-and-now. Nipo uses these sources to create a new, timeless reality. His art marries the past with the development of Modern art.

 “I see painting first and foremost as a craft”, Nipo has said regarding Portrait of a Craftsman, the Workshop (2001) – in which paintings, drawings and studio tools acts as a kind of personal and artistic autobiographical space. At the center of the painting is a portrait of Renaissance artist Titian, whose paintings Nipo had copied as a boy; to its right, a viewfinder; above his head, a postcard reproduction of Vermeer’s Girl with Pearl Earring; alongside it, a butterfly from the Amazonas in Brazil – Nipo’s country of birth; underneath them one can see a photograph of Nipo and his colleague Aram Gershuni (seen during work criticism at painter Israel Hershberg’s school); at his feet is his beloved dog, Chapo, sprawled on the floor tiles on a hot day; to his left we can see hanging tools that used to belong to his father, a goldsmith, and an empty chair (which for Nipo has come to symbolize an unknowable, mysterious presence associated with his father, to whom the catalogue is dedicated).