Slat By Slat | Hilla Toony Navok
Slat By Slat | Hilla Toony Navok
“Slat by Slat” is the new exhibition by Rappaport Prize-winning artist Hilla Toony Navok.
Following two major sculpture exhibitions at the Tel Aviv Museum and the Herzliya Museum, Navok now presents a new series of drawings at Noga Gallery, created using an unusual sculptural technique. Over the past year, she has produced hundreds of small, individual units of abstract drawings—like building blocks. Through an extensive process of assembly, she has carefully combined these units to form rich, dense, and multilayered compositions.
The exhibition features 11 new drawings on paper alongside four relief drawings made of aluminum, each in a square format. In these relief drawings, Navok has integrated various everyday objects taken from domestic spaces—towels, blinds, a pipe, and half of a work table—embedding them into the compositions. This process of merging objects with the drawings highlights their abstract and sculptural qualities.
The techniques of layering, compression, and assembly evoke a sense of fortification and blockage —a feeling of falling apart and collapsing—paired with a desperate attempt to hold everything together and make use of what there is.
Hilla Toony Navok, born in Tel Aviv-Yafo, works across sculpture, video, and drawing. She teaches sculpture at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design. Her work explores abstract and poetic qualities found in everyday Israeli surroundings and well-recognized local materials.
Navok has received numerous awards, including the Rappaport Prize for a Promising Artist from the Tel Aviv Museum of Art (2020), the Beatrice Kolliner Prize for a Young Artist from the Israel Museum (2019), the Discount Bank Prize (2020), the Minister of Culture Prize (2019), and an Artist Residency Scholarship at Artport (2015).
She is also a co-publisher at Poraz et Navok. Her Permanent public sculptures include Lighthouse (2023), installed on Al Parashat Drahim Street in Tel Aviv, and Sunrise-Sunset (2019), located at the Navon train station in Jerusalem.