Know Hope: The water Takes The Shapes of Its Container

In 2015 Chenus Longhi Gallery is continuing to blaze a trail on the international urban contemporary art scene, and for the first time in France is putting on an exhibition by Know Hope, a young Israeli artist whose work is as poetic as it is political.
Know Hope has been displaying his work in the public space as well as in galleries since 2005. While the Israel-Palestine conflict is an important social and intellectual backdrop to his work (he lives in the city of Tel-Aviv in Israel), his favourite subjects are borders, identity and humanity. His works thus feature a recurring symbolic figure, seen in physical and metaphorical situations, his heart sewn to his sleeve, leaving a gap where it would normally be.
The textual interventions and installations that Know Hope creates in situ in places on the fringe of cities echo his studio pieces, which are made from ephemeral or untreated materials such as card, paper or wood, often in the form of assemblages. They increasingly include photography, a reflection of the artist's vision of the world around him. A vision filled with love and hope. Although not yet 30, Know Hope has already had an outstanding career on the international contemporary art scene. His work has already been displayed in museums (the Roskilde Museum of Contemporary Art in Denmark amongst others has acquired one of his installations) and he is now represented by major galleries in Los Angeles, London and Tel-Aviv.

Water Takes the Shape of its Container exhibition presents some twenty previously unseen pieces, assemblages of paper, wood and photographs, and an installation. This installation portrays a collective situation, taking the form of a pile of colored tree stumps, and showing representations of each component of that collective situation. In this way, each piece is insight to a personal narrative, a visual representation of the individual situation, that exists within the collective.
For Know Hope, art is above all there to remind people of their humanity. Know Hope shows "a portrayal of political juxtapositions, alongside emotional conditions, showing correlations, similarities, coexistence/dependence etc. By perceiving political situations as emotional mechanisms, not only does it broaden the discussion, but allows it to take place intuitively. Our intuitions are political compasses, and a political situation has immense effect on our emotional state and capabilities, the humanness that we recognize/don't recognize in each other, hence the title Water Takes the Shape of its Container."