HERZLIYA.- Artist Hilla Toony Navok is the recipient of the 2020 Discount Artistic Encouragement Award at the Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art. Excerpt from the jury’s reasoning: “Hilla Toony Navok’s works draw their inspiration from the material Israeli environment surrounding her. In her work familiar, readymade objects, and accordingly acute realism, are coupled with geometric abstraction. Contemporaneity and modernism are combined with great talent, encapsulating expressions of humor and critique of our time.”

Hilla Toony Navok, born in 1974 in Tel Aviv, pursues both drawing and sculpting. She holds a bachelor’s degree in design from WIZO Haifa, and a master’s degree in art from the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design. Her works have been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions at museums and galleries in Israel and abroad. A work by Navok is on permanent display at the New Train Terminal in Jerusalem (Navon Station). She is a recipient of the Rapaport Prize (2020); Minister of Culture Award and Encouragement of Creativity Award by the Ministry of Culture (2012, 2019); The Israel Museum’s Kolliner Award for a Young Israeli Artist (2018); and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art’s Givon Prize (2011), among others. In her work, Navok deciphers the codes of Israeli architecture and design, tracing degraded forms of high modernism and abstraction in popular consumer products. Her works are marked by surprising and original sculptural use of common, everyday materials and objects, thereby revealing their latent qualities and offering new ways of looking at them.

A solo exhibition of Navok’s work will be on view in the Great Hall of the Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art in February 2021, sponsored by the Discount Artistic Encouragement Award. At the heart of the exhibition will be a large kinetic installation that refers to the architectural properties of the space. Navok uses PVC sheets to create a sculptural-playful environment made up of structures that shift between opening and closing, alternately revealing and concealing their mechanisms of movement. The kinetic operation creates an “abstract drawing in space,” and transitions between matter in its raw state and a functioning structure, and between a complete image and a disassembled version of it.

The Discount Artistic Encouragement Award is awarded annually at the Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art to an Israeli artist. The recipient is selected from among the artists whose work is scheduled to be exhibited at the Herzliya Museum that year, by the Discount Bank’s Art Committee: Shulamit Nuss, in charge of the Discount Bank Collection; Roni Gilat-Baharaff, Managing Director of Christie’s Israel; curator Irith Hadar; and curator Roni Cohen-Binyamini. The prize consists of a grant of NIS 40,000 for the artist to produce his or her exhibition at the Museum.