Adi Nes

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Untitled [2000]. A well-known photograph of sleeping Israeli boys, paradigmatic of Nes' style.

Adi Nes (b. 1966 in Kiryat Gat) is an Israeli photographer best known for his photographs of Israeli boys and IDF soldiers. In 2003 he did a feature for Vogue Hommes. Nes has given solo exhibitions at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego, and the Melkweg Gallery in Amsterdam, among others. His work has also shown in group exhibitions at the Hotel de Sully in Paris and the Jewish Museum in New York, among many others. He has been reviewed in The New York Times, the Financial Times, and others.^[1] In 2005 Nes was chosen as an outstanding artist of the prestigious Israel Cultural Excellence Foundation.

Nes' most famous piece recalls Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Supper, replacing the characters with young male Israeli soldiers. A print sold at auction in Sotheby's for $102,000 in 2005,^[2] and another for $264,000 in 2007^[3].

Nes' early work has been characterized as subverting the stereotype of the masculine Israeli man by using homoeroticism and sleeping, vulnerable figures.^[4] He regularly uses dark-skinned Israeli models, who are often the subject of discrimination in Israel because they look like Arabs.^[5] The models' poses often evoke Caravaggio. Nes has said that the inspiration for his photography is partially autobiographical:

“	My staged photographs are oversized and often recall well-known scenes from Art History and Western Civilization combined with personal experiences based on my life as a gay youth growing up in a small town on the periphery of Israeli society.	”
—Adi Nes^[6]

Nes lives and works in Tel Aviv. His work is currently sold through Jack Shainman Gallery in New York City. In January 2007, he premiered a new series echoing Biblical stories.^[7]