Ilan Averbuch
After the Fire
November 5, 2026 - February 3, 2027
Q&A with Ilan Averbuch re “After the Fire” exhibition at Nancy Hoffman Gallery
Nov 5, 2026- Feb 3, 2027Q: How would you describe your work to somebody who had never seen it before or was seeing it for the first time?
A: Large sculptures of recycled materials such as curbstone from streets and steel from old bridges that defy laws of gravity and expectation. Familiar images are recycled and reapplied, taking on meaning as symbols or metaphors to tell a story through a balance of scale, material, and mass.
Q: Is the work in the current exhibition at Nancy Hoffman Gallery a departure from former sculptural work? If so, how is it different or new?
A: There is a more explicit human reference in some sculptures containing faces carved in granite stone so the symbolism becomes more specific.
Q: The title of the exhibition is "Ilan Averbuch: After the Fire." Can you explain the meaning of that title?
A: When I started working on this show, in the background was the war in Gaza and to me as an Israeli born I was horrified by the daily images of the destruction in Gaza that followed as revenge after October 7th. The fire was a reference to the daily bombardment in Gaza, but then came a personal tragedy when my house and studio were burnt in a fire, and much of my work on paper and my documentation of 40 years of work, were destroyed by it.
Q: There is a sculpture in the exhibition that resembles The Star of David, but on closer looking, it actually has seven points. Why?
A: I am still searching for an answer. The surprise of something that reads as a Star of David but it is not felt very close to my feeling of growing up with a symbol that is no longer the same.
Q: There is a mosaic of 75 drawings in the exhibition. Can you tell us about it?
A: I have two types of drawings, small intuitive sketches usually drawn in my notebook, and large explicitly worked out drawings usually as a preparation for the making of large public sculptures or exhibition sculptures. The small drawings are documentary, immediate, and reactive. The large works are more meditative tools for the vision of my sculptures.
My small drawings begin with an instinct rather than a specific aim. They are not tied to a commission, rather my imagination and subconscious. These images remain in my sketch book or drawers, sometimes for years. When I am looking for ideas for a public sculpture, I search through them as if looking for something I have lost, something I already recorded. When I find a drawing from that moment, that memory, I have a starting point. The mosaic speaks to a cognitive mapping of my imagination of subconscious.
After the Fire is a new body of sculpture and works on paper by Ilan Averbuch, his first exhibition at Nancy Hoffman Gallery since 2017. The exhibition continues a defining thread in Averbuch’s practice: the transformation of materials recovered from built environments – stone pulled from old bridges, curbstone salvaged from city streets, steel drawn from industrial sites – into vessels for memory, history, and interpretation.
The exhibition brings together sculptures in granite and steel with an extensive body of drawings, including large-format works on paper and smaller drawings framed and installed together in a single, mosaic-like composition. The accumulation of drawings creates a field of shifting scale, gesture, and mark-making, placing the intimacy of the drawn line in dialogue with the physical weight and monumentality of Averbuch’s sculpture.
Central to Averbuch’s practice is what he calls a “rupture of balance.” Providing recycled materials with a new purpose, he resists the notion that a structure’s first function determines its final meaning. The resulting works transform the heavy and literal objects into something more elusive, imbuing them with a sense of memory, movement, and suspension. In Red Moon, stone and steel form an eclipse that shifts and dissolves as the viewer moves around it. Nearby, Even Walls Can Move transforms brick and bent steel on an intimate scale, enlivening the brick wall in a boat form, providing it with a sense of animacy and motion. On a larger scale Bearers of Memory extends this inquiry into human ingenuity and the long history of migration.
“My work is a search for the meeting point between the earth and the human mind,” Averbuch reflects. “I am interested in how a massive stone can suggest a state of flight, or how a rigid steel wall can appear to bend under the weight of history.”
The exhibition also finds Averbuch confronting questions of heritage and identity. It Is Not is a large, low-to-the-ground steel sculpture in the form of a seven-pointed star. Carved granite heads lie beneath its weight while simultaneously serving as the supports that hold the structure upright, bearing the star’s full mass as they remain pinned beneath it. The work grapples directly with the artist’s identity in the shadow of the war in Gaza, refusing an easy or symmetrical resolution. Elsewhere, Greif (Masks) presents four carved stone visages, their eyes closed and expressions drawn downward in a shared, wordless sorrow, hovering between portrait and relic.
After the Fire gathers more than a decade of Averbuch’s sculpture and drawing practice in an exhibition concerned with the persistence of material – and with the ways memory, history, and inheritance remain embedded within it.
Based in Long Island City, New York, Averbuch has created sculptures and public installations in cities across the globe, from the Supreme Court in Jerusalem to the Governor Mario M. Cuomo Bridge in New York.
Averbuch was born in Tel Aviv, Israel. Averbuch’s work is held in numerous prestigious collections, including the Israel Museum and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. This exhibition follows a career of major public sculpture commissions, most recently at Bicentennial Park in Macon, Georgia (2025) and Fire House 46 in Charlotte, North Carolina (2026).