Nahum Tevet (1946, Israel) lives and works in Tel Aviv, Israel.
Nahum Tevet’s poetics is based upon the connections between painting, sculpture and architecture. The ‘building blocks’ that comprise Tevet’s formal vocabulary, for both his small wall works and the large, sprawling sculptural installations are never ‘ready mades’. They are simple, almost archetypal forms: the chair, the table, the box, the boat, the book, etc. As viewers, confronted with a nested configuration of these ‘building blocks’ in different colors and measures, some right-side up, others resting on their side, some upside-down, we are required to constantly recalibrate and puzzle out an elusive ‘correct’ point of view. What exactly are we looking at? From where? What is up and what is down? What is foreground or background? What is large and what is small? Near or far? As viewers, we are seduced by the kaleidoscopic, multiplying, mirroring, doubling of familiar forms in intriguing compositions, of which the structure, crucially, never completely emerges.
Tevet has been the subject of major survey exhibitions at both the Israel Museum in Jerusalem and the Tel Aviv Museum. His work has been part of exhibitions worldwide since 1975, such as numerous solo and group exhibitions in Europe and the United States, among which Documenta 8 (1987), the Sao Paulo Biennale (1994), the Biennale of Lyon (1997) and the Venice Biennale (2003), but also museum shows at the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig in Vienna (1997), the Carnegie International (1999), the Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Roma (2008) and the Kunstmuseum Bochum (2015).
His work is included in many important museum collections including The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA; Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR; Museum of Modern Art, Ludwig Foundation, MUMOK, Vienna, Austria; Kaiser Wilhelm Museum, Krefeld, Germany; FRAC Bretagne, France; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem; and Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv, and more.