NEW YORK, NY.- Andrew Kreps Gallery announced the representation of Uri Aran, an artist who over the past decade has developed a singular practice centered on an ongoing, philosophical inquiry into how our daily behaviors are used to create and assign meaning.




Aran maintains a fluid relationship with material, connecting disparate subject matter through the familiar processes of everyday life - translation, mediation, and organization. Working across sculpture, film, performance, drawing, and painting, Aran employs a distinct vernacular that defies traditional linguistic systems, using recurring elements to establish rhythmic relationships across his works. Objects and motifs, such as handwriting, personal photographs, studio detritus, drawings, and ephemera repeat across surfaces of Aran’s sculptures, which appear as compositional experiments, or workstations left in process. Suspended in time, these idiosyncratic elements work to conjure an imagined memory, while indications of their owner’s identity are left omitted, calling the narratives formed into question. This process highlights a tension between sentiment, and sentimentality, and reveals the larger, often invisible systems that trigger our emotive responses to the environments that surround us. Aran takes a similar approach within his video and performance works, as mnemonic devices, cinematic and theatrical tropes such as voiceover, typically used to develop comprehension, instead serve to continuously reorient the viewer. In keeping the work’s logic elastic, Aran emphasizes the constant navigation of motives that shape our emotional responses - from those that are intuited to those that are learned.

These strategies carry over to Aran’s drawings and paintings, which are formed by layering opposing languages of marks, ranging from childlike to analytic, onto the same surface. Elements that appear to be quoted from an outside source, such as caricatures and anthropomorphized animals, are disrupted by improvisational marks and notational writing, causing repeated shifts in focus. In turn, the overall image sits at the brink of decipherability, leaving its individual parts still pliable. Seen as a whole, Aran’s practice revels in an interstitial space where contradictory elements and emotions are not opposed or disconnected, but instead share their own reality, as they often do in life.

Uri Aran (b. 1977, Jerusalem) lives and works in New York. The gallery will present The Fastest Boy In The World, a project with recent works by Aran at 22 Cortlandt Alley from June 4 - July 2. Aran’s work has been exhibited extensively, with recent solo exhibitions including: House, Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New York, 2020, Tenants Like These, Sadie Coles HQ, London, 2019, Mice, Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne, 2016, Two Things About Suffering, Sadie Coles HQ, London, 2016, Sensitivo, Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne, 2014, Puddles, Peep-Hole, Milan, 2014, Five Minutes Before, South London Gallery, London, 2013, here, here and here, Kunsthalle Zürich, Zurich, 2013, among others. Aran additionally participated in the 2014 Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2014, A Needle Walks into a Haystack, Liverpool Biennial 2014, Liverpool, and The Encyclopedic Palace, 55th International Art Exhibition, Venice Biennale, Venice, 2013, as well as numerous group exhibitions, which include: 100 Drawings from Now, The Drawing Center, New York, 2020, Platforms: Commissions and Collection, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 2019, Take Me (I'm Yours), Jewish Museum, New York, 2016, Question the Wall Itself, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 2016, among others. Uri Aran received an MFA from Columbia University, New York in 2007, and additionally studied at Cooper Union, New York, and completed a Bachelor of Design at Bezalel Academy Jerusalem, Jerusalem in 2004. His work is held in the permanent collections of the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, the Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, RISD Museum, Providence, Rhode Island, Israel Museum, Jerusalem, The University of Chicago Booth School of Business, Chicago, among others.