Stav Theodor‑Kimhi

The swimming pool is one of the most loaded images in Israeli art. Inside the blue rectangle of water, ideology and fantasy meet, the collective and the individual, body and memory, abundance and escapism.

Over the years its meaning has shifted along with Israeli society: from the pioneering ethos of making the desert bloom, of shared life and the collective, toward more private and intimate spaces, of the body, class, psyche, and fantasy.

Through the work of five artists, we will try to look at what hides beneath the surface of the water.

1. Tanja Lažetić | "Six Swimming Pools Behind Broken Glass," 2014

Lažetić's starting point is actually in Los Angeles.

In 1968 the American artist Ed Ruscha published Nine Swimming Pools and a Broken Glass, an artist's book that became a canon of conceptual art. Ruscha documented private, empty pools around Los Angeles: quiet blue surfaces, ringed by lawns, umbrellas, and diving boards, symbols of a culture of leisure and luxury emptied of any human presence.

Almost five decades later, Lažetić returns to that work through Israeli history. She collects postcards from the 1970s of pools at rest houses and kibbutzim. Unlike Ruscha's private, empty pools, the Israeli ones are full of people: children, women, and families. They are surrounded by lawns, groves, and landscape, an image of collective leisure and of a communal society.

Each pool is seen through a shattered mirror, and so the idyll cracks as well. The pool becomes a marker of ideology and of power relations: between sharing and privilege, between the Histadrut convalescence of the past and today's consumer culture, and between the Israeli collective that was promised and what remains of it.

2. Pamela Levy | Pool

Levy (1949-2004), born in the United States, was one of the pioneers of feminist art in Israel. She was ahead of her time and touched on subjects that in the 1980s and 1990s were still taboo: the male gaze on the female body, sexual violence, vulnerability. Even when she paints the sea or a swimming pool, spaces supposedly tied to summer, freedom, and innocence, something is not at ease. Beneath a scene that looks innocent, a quiet danger is always stirring. Children, girls on the verge of adolescence, are crowded densely onto the canvas, exposed not only physically but also to the gaze that watches them. The pool becomes a space where the line between innocence and seduction, between pleasure and danger, and between looking and voyeurism turns especially unsettling.

3. Tal Shochat | "Pool," 2003

With Tal Shochat we move into another world: quiet, meticulous, and almost perfect. Shochat's photographs are staged down to the last detail. The lighting is artificial, the composition controlled, and the sharpness almost hyperreal. Her work constantly examines the blurred border between the natural and the artificial, between documentation and fantasy. Her pool is too beautiful, tempting us to step into a world of water, beauty, and calm, and at the same time exposing the artifice behind the fantasy. This is a pool built to look perfect, and that is exactly what makes it slightly disturbing: a beauty so controlled that it no longer feels real.

4. Belu-Simion Fainaru | "Rose of Nothingness," Venice Biennale, 2026

With Belu-Simion Fainaru the water changes its meaning once again. In the installation chosen to represent Israel at the 61st Venice Biennale, a black pool collects drops that fall from a system of drippers suspended above it. Here there is no swimming, no body, no vacation. The water becomes a material of time, memory, and mourning. Each drop strikes the surface of the pool, creates a ripple, and is swallowed into it.

The pool, which at the start of our story was a symbol of society, abundance, and leisure, becomes here a quiet, meditative space of absence. This is an image almost entirely opposite to the pool we know as a place of body, sun, and pleasure.

5. Shira Barzilay (Koketit) | Pool Art

Shira Barzilay, known worldwide as "Koketit," closes the circle in a completely different place. Every work of hers begins from a single continuous line, a face or a female body taking shape from a minimalist line that leaves the paper and moves onto the floor of the swimming pool. And when the water moves and the sun breaks across it, the static drawing begins to move, the lines distort with the motion, and the painted body seems for a moment alive and breathing.

For Barzilay the pool is neither critique nor longing. It is a canvas, lightness, beauty, luxury.

After the collective, political, threatening, artificial, and mourning pool, we end with the pool as a space of body, movement, beauty, and pleasure. One rectangle of water tells the whole Israeli story: what was shared, what cracked, and what remained beautiful in spite of everything.

Late August, and the Tel Aviv heat is at its peak. Yet right now the city holds three exhibitions with a rare kind of quiet. All three, each in its own way, are about absence: pools without people, a landscape emptied of noise, and a studio left without its artist. Here are three shows I think are worth visiting before the summer ends:

Melanie Siegel, "Every Look Was a New Window"

Melanie Siegel's swimming pools hang on the walls of Braverman Gallery and offer whoever walks in a brief respite from the scorching July and August heat of the city. But despite their cool, refreshing look, something in them refuses to sit easy. They are quiet, clean, and precise, and for exactly that reason also a little unsettling. There is no one in them. The water is still, the light a grayish blue, and the spaces around them empty and polished, as if painted a moment before someone is about to step in, or a moment after everyone has already left.

Siegel's landscapes sit somewhere between reality and imagination. Her starting point is real places, but over the course of the work they shift until they become invented, idealized scenes. The pools and their designed surroundings look almost like architectural models: precise, orderly, and detached from everyday life. There is something surreal about them: they look entirely possible, and yet they seem not to belong to any real world.

The longer you linger in front of the paintings, the clearer it becomes that these pools are not only a place but also a state of mind. The reflections in the water, the play of light and shadow, and the clean geometric lines create an appearance of calm and harmony, beneath which a vague sense of unease is stirring. The works move along the border between utopia and dystopia: between the longing for nature, quiet, and vacation, and the human attempt to control the environment and shape it.

📍 Braverman Gallery, 33 Eilat St, Tel Aviv
📅 Through September 17

From the empty pools to a whole world of dream, at one of my favorite galleries in the city, Nassima Landau (Suzanne Landau is one of the most influential women in the Israeli art world. She was chief curator at the Israel Museum and director and chief curator at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, and also a co founder of the foundation).

The exhibition "Finding Neverland" draws its inspiration from J.M. Barrie's "Peter Pan," and offers a moment of immersion in a utopian universe where dreaming, refuge, and renewal become possible again. The landscapes here are emptied of noise, time stands still, and something long forgotten surfaces once more.

Among the works you can meet the golden, shimmering water lilies of Nir Hod, an Israeli artist based in New York, alongside the invented, lush forests of the Belgian painter Ben Sledsens. Two very different routes to the same escape: one polished and refined, the other wild and colorful, and both invite you inside.

📍 Nassima Landau, 55 Ahad Ha'am St, Tel Aviv
📅 Through September 24

"Guarantee of Sanity" (תרגלתי סטודיו), Dana Darvish and Rami Maymon

Dana Darvish (born 1975, died 2025) was an Israeli artist and photographer who worked for more than two decades in photography based practices. Almost all the photographs she worked with are taken from catalogues, posters, postcards, and publications. From them she created a collage like chain: a work, a photograph of a work, a photograph that meets another photograph or a text, and finally a photomontage that multiplies its meaning. In this way she offered further ways to look at the meeting between a work and the gallery, the paper, and consciousness.

Over the years she kept a deep artistic dialogue and a close friendship with the artist and photographer Rami Maymon. Before her death she asked him and the curator Ilanit Konopny to manage her art estate. The exhibition grew out of the process in which Maymon organized her studio, and it slowly became something else: a shared studio, an archive in formation, a place where her works and his keep talking to each other. This is not a farewell. It is a room where an artist's practice still goes on, even without her.

📍 Maya Gallery, Shvil Hameretz 2, Kiryat HaMelacha, Tel Aviv
📅 Through September 12

In the last two weeks of August, the New York art world seems to come to a halt. Many of the galleries in Chelsea are closed or keeping reduced hours, and others are showing group exhibitions instead of solo shows. This pause lets them reveal their own tone and artistic direction, present young artists alongside familiar names, and prepare for the opening of the fall season.

But! There is one gallery that, right now, is opening a solo exhibition, and not just any solo, but one by an artist of our own who is well worth knowing.

Oren Fischer.

Fischer was one of the founders of the "Meshunar" gallery in Tel Aviv, an alternative space that gave a platform to young local artists, with no self censorship and no compromises. Three years later he won the Sotheby's Hammer Prize at the young artists' greenhouse of the Fresh Paint fair, a win that led to a solo exhibition in Sotheby's space in Tel Aviv. Since then he has worked across a wide range of mediums and scales, from small etchings to monumental works in public space.

This week his first solo exhibition in New York opened, "Hallel," at 81 Leonard Gallery in Tribeca.

The story behind the exhibition is unusual too. It grew out of a collaboration with Havurah, a young Jewish collective of artists, designers, and curators from New York, dedicated to advancing contemporary Jewish culture. The members of the collective made the connection to the gallery and even funded the exhibition.

At the center of the space hang six enormous canvases, each about five meters tall, originally created as the set for a performance in Israel and now turning the gallery into a kind of temple. Around them are some 70 wooden sculptures, paintings that were cut and reassembled on wooden boards, etchings, and illustrated newspapers Fischer made while living on Kibbutz Samar.

But the works are not only impressive in scale. Fischer moves between the figurative and the abstract, between the personal and the collective, connecting biblical stories to contemporary Israeli reality. He engages with heritage, spirituality, belonging, and loneliness, bringing together again and again past and present, pain and joy, sacrifice and hope. Figures of mothers and soldiers, symbols of fertility and protection, and a human landscape made up of Jews and Arabs coexist within a complex vision of Israeli society, not necessarily as it is, but as it might yet become.

"Hallel" is an expression of praise and gratitude, for love, for the wisdom of generations, and for home. And that is exactly what Fischer does here: he does not soften the pain, but casts direct light on it while holding alongside it the beauty, the hope, and the gratitude.

To be an Israeli artist in New York right now is not something to take for granted. But Fischer, as always, chooses the light.

📍 81 Leonard Gallery, Tribeca, New York
📅 "Hallel," through September 5. Wednesday to Saturday, 12:00 to 18:00 (or by appointment)

As a curator, I believe that if you want to discover the artists of tomorrow, you have to start at the graduate exhibitions. It is there, long before the names become familiar, that you can meet the artists who will shape the artistic conversation in the years to come. This year, at the Bezalel graduate exhibition, one artist caught my attention in particular.

Noa Wiegenfeld's paintings carry a synthetic, staged quality. The virtuosity of the brush works in two directions at once: at first glance you seem to stand before a digital image, too polished and precise to have been painted by hand, and only up close do the colored brushstrokes reveal themselves and return the work to matter.

The color itself holds this tension. The intense, glaring orange is not natural light but an artificial injection that floods the figure and the floor without our knowing where it comes from. Although the image shows an intimate moment, a woman or a girl in her room, the spotlight, positioned beyond the edge of the viewer's gaze, works like the lighting of a film set, and sharpens the gap between the intimacy of the scene and the strangeness of the space, the sense of a staged moment.

The curtain feels synthetic too. This is not the heavy velvet curtain of the Renaissance and the Baroque, meant to conceal or to glorify. Throughout art history the curtain invites us to glimpse the space behind it, but in Wiegenfeld's work it does the opposite: the background does not open onto any real space with depth and event, only onto a flat, glaring patch of color. The curtain conceals nothing. It is the image itself.

White dominates Tom Fima's canvases. Nightgowns, bedsheets, lace, fabrics slipping to the floor. The bed is the stage, and the domestic room is the whole arena, lit by artificial light coming from the room's own lamp. The figures are young women, her friends, whom she photographs and then paints from the photographs. Many faces are covered by fabric, a kind of play between concealment and exposure.

The gaze lingers on the relationship between body and fabric: bare skin against lace and satin, the folds of the blankets and the garments. It is no coincidence that the textile stands at the center. Fima's mother designed lingerie, and for her the fabric carries a memory of craft, touch, and cut.

At the heart of the works stands a shared female space. Women sew, mend, rest side by side. Fima lets her figures dwell in tasks that demand patience, a counterpoint to a world in which women no longer have the leisure to linger. In place of the demanding gaze, the painting offers suspension: time held still in a white room, a moment before one of them lifts the sheet and reveals her face.

Fima is an artist at the beginning of her path, one worth following as she develops. Even in these works a distinct painterly voice, material sensitivity, and conceptual maturity are already evident, marking significant artistic potential.

📍 Gallery Be'eri, Beit Romano, Tel Aviv

In 2007, right before I began my university studies, I set out on the big trip through South America. My first stop was Colombia, and one of the first places I reached was Cartagena, a Caribbean city, picturesque, colorful and full of life, that captured my heart at once.

In one of the main squares of the old city I came across a monumental bronze sculpture of a full bodied woman lying on her side. The style of the sculpture was so distinctive that I was enchanted, and I immediately began to find out who the artist was who had created it. The answer led me from Cartagena straight to Medellín, to a wide open square where 23 of the artist's sculptures are installed. The square is also named after him.

A Colombian artist, born in Medellín, and perhaps the most famous to come out of Colombia. Have you guessed already?

If you thought of Fernando Botero... you were right!

Botero's works, sculptures and paintings, are almost impossible to miss. The style identified with him, known as Boterismo, is characterized by figures and objects with monumental volumes, exaggerated proportions and pronounced roundness. But for him it was never simply about "fat people," it was an exploration of volume, mass and presence.

In his work Botero engaged with scenes from everyday life, with still life, with ironic interpretations of classical works, as well as with aspects of cultural and national memory. Through rich color, humor, irony and at times social and political critique, he created a distinctive visual world that is instantly identified with him.

In 1960, at the age of 28, Botero moved from Bogotá to New York with only 200 dollars in his pocket. Like so many of the city's residents, he arrived out of a desire to work hard and realize his personal and professional dreams, and there is no doubt that he did, and true to the style that defines him, he did it in a big way :).

The excellent exhibition Botero in New York at Sotheby's, created in partnership with the Botero Foundation, focuses on the artist's formative years in New York, between 1960 and 1973, and presents paintings, sculptures and works on paper alongside a number of works from later periods. Many of the works come from the artist's family collection and from the Botero Foundation, and some have never been shown publicly.

Through the works you can trace the way Botero shaped his distinctive visual language, at a time when abstraction and minimalism were at the center of the American scene. Precisely against the currents that dominated that period, he insisted on figurative painting and developed the style that would later become Boterismo.

All the works in the exhibition are intriguing, but the still life paintings stand out in particular for their bold colors, their precise compositions and the way Botero gives fruit and everyday objects an almost monumental volume and presence.

This will most likely be the first exhibition I go to see when I return to the United States.

📍 Sotheby's, New York
📅 Through September 7, 2026 💐

Three exhibitions. Three mediums. Three good reasons to leave the house this weekend.

July is almost over, and with it three excellent exhibitions that close soon. All three are about light: as material, as metaphor, and as a tool for making an image.

✨ Sabine Marcelis, born in the Netherlands in 1985, is a successful designer known for work that combines resin, glass and light in a way that blurs the line between design, sculpture and functional object.

Phases is her first solo exhibition in the United States, and it grew out of an attempt to capture one of the most elusive moments in nature: the hour before sunset, when the sky shifts shade continuously and light itself seems like a material in motion. The works are a reminder of how far light can go as a raw material in its own right. It is no accident that Salon 94 compared her to artists such as James Turrell, Robert Irwin and Dan Flavin.

📍 Salon 94 Design, New York
📅 Through July 29

🎨 Guimi You is a Korean artist whose exhibition When the Sun Shines Again is dedicated to women who have returned to making art after a long time away 💛. The sun coming back to shine serves her as a metaphor for beginning again, and light appears again and again as a force of renewal and hope.

Her painting language draws on East Asian painting traditions, with forms that are not bounded by clear contour lines and transparent layers that create a sense of depth and delicacy. Alongside that, her paintings carry the influence of Surrealism, a movement characterized by connections between everyday objects and an enigmatic atmosphere. These are paintings that do not ask to impress you immediately. They invite slow looking, in which atmosphere and feeling build gradually.

📍 Lehmann Maupin, New York
📅 Through August 14

📸 Lillian Bassman (1917 to 2012) was among the photographers who most influenced twentieth century fashion photography, but she was never content to document clothes. Instead of emphasizing the details, she blurred them. Through exposures, bleaching, smudging and manual intervention in the darkroom, she created images in which the garment almost dissolves, and what remains is a sense of light, movement and elegance.

The exhibition Lillian Bassman: Bazaar and Beyond follows her path from her years at Harper's Bazaar, one of the most influential fashion magazines in the world, as a designer and art director, through to her emergence as one of the most innovative fashion photographers of her time. Alongside iconic photographs it presents collages, sketches and rare working materials that reveal how she helped shape the visual language of mid century fashion magazines.

📍 The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
📅 Through July 26

How much power can there be in something that looks as if it is about to collapse at any moment?

That is not only the question that accompanies the exhibition currently on view at the Guggenheim. It is also the first sensation it produces in everyone who walks in.

The new exhibition by Carol Bove is the artist's first museum survey. It fills the entire iconic rotunda of the Guggenheim Museum and presents works made over more than 25 years.

Carol Bove (born 1971 in Geneva; lives and works in New York) is known above all for her large, colorful metal sculptures. She takes industrial steel and crushes, crumples, stretches and coils it until it looks almost like fabric, paper or a soft ribbon fluttering in the wind. These sculptures, which defy what you expect the material to do, have become emblematic of Bove's work and won her international attention. They seem light, soft and fragile, but as you come closer you realize they are made of tons of steel. They strike a delicate balance and look as if they are defeating gravity.

And that is exactly the sensation the exhibition creates from the very first moment.

Even before you read the curatorial text or try to grasp the ideas behind the works, the eye and the body respond. The sculptures look as if they have lost their balance, as if at any moment they will collapse, buckle, come apart or give in to gravity. Even knowing that these are heavy, completely stable steel structures, the eye keeps insisting that they are fragile. Only later, as you climb up the spiral, do you begin to understand that the exhibition is far more than an impressive display of material and form.

Alongside the steel sculptures are early works that look as if they were made by an entirely different artist: simple shelves arranged with paperback books from the 1960s and 1970s, intimate paper collages, and works made from unexpected materials such as peacock feathers and seashells. Throughout, colorful aluminum panels appear as well, in geometric shapes and vivid tones.

The range of languages, materials and forms is so wide that for a moment you could genuinely think you are looking at several different artists.

Especially interesting is the curatorial decision to arrange the display in reverse: the newest works at the start of the route, and as you climb the spiral you move back in time toward the earliest ones. This way you see not only how her language changed over the years, but also how much she refuses to commit to a single material, a single style or a single way of working.

And beyond all these layers, this is simply a colorful and joyful exhibition, the kind you can wander through and enjoy for its color, its shapes and its space.

If you are in New York, it is worth hurrying: the exhibition is open through August 2, 2026.

And if you feel like ending the day in style, drop by Bemelmans Bar at The Carlyle, about a 15 minute walk from the museum. One of New York's iconic cocktail bars, with a classic atmosphere, live piano almost every evening and excellent cocktails.

💡 Tip: free entry to the Guggenheim with a library card.

📍 Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
📅 Through August 2, 2026

There are exhibitions where it isn't the art itself that shakes me, but what lies behind it.

I wanted to write to you with enthusiasm about the exhibition In a Free State at Luhring Augustine in Tribeca.

Artistically, it's an interesting show: 34 works by 22 artists across painting, sculpture, photography and video, chosen by two of the most prominent figurative painters working in New York today, the Israeli Doron Langberg and the Pakistani Salman Toor. The exhibition sets out to address the collapse of trust in the contemporary world and life under the shadow of war, displacement and political crisis.

Here is how the curators describe it themselves:

"For this exhibition we drew from our close circle of friends, connected with artists we have long admired, and reached out to younger voices that excite us. We looked for works that somehow give us insight into the fraught moment we are living in, a time when the structures of trust, from the interpersonal to the political, seem to have collapsed."

Two works in the show held me in particular:

Oren Pinhassi is an Israeli sculptor who lives and works in New York. His work often deals with the human body, vulnerability, gender, architecture and ritual. He combines "hard" materials such as steel and stone with "soft" or more perishable ones, creating objects that read at once as bodies, archaeological remains or totems. Already in the title Perforated Self you can sense his ongoing concern with a body that is not whole or sealed, but permeable and vulnerable, and it fits into one of the show's central axes: the tension between armor and woundedness.

Jordan Nassar is an American artist of Jordanian descent whose work sits exactly on the seam between art, craft, identity and politics. He uses traditional embroidery (Tatreez), the Arab village needlework of the Land of Israel region, as his central raw material. The embroidery is not merely aesthetic, but a language of identity, heritage and belonging. Through it he creates imagined landscapes, places that exist in memory and in longing more than in reality, engaging with home, exile and the intergenerational transmission of culture.

I enjoyed the exhibition, and yet it was hard to ignore the elephant in the room. The choice to draw from a circle of friends takes nothing away from the quality of the works or of the selection, but it raises a curatorial question: does the exhibition widen the boundaries of the conversation, or does it mostly gather artists with similar political and cultural sensibilities, ones that lean toward liberal and progressive worldviews?

In an interview the curator Doron Langberg gave to The New York Times, he describes the war in Gaza as a turning point that forced him to engage for the first time with his Israeli identity, ties it to the memory of the Holocaust in his family, and asks how one can love one's home when the state you are connected to commits, in his words, cruel acts. But in all those words there is not a single mention of October 7, of the massacre, of the 240 hostages, or of Hamas. His framing begins from the reality in Gaza and from the Israeli response, as if the war erupted out of nowhere. And once you know that, it is hard to stand before the works without thinking about what is left outside the frame.

I have no problem with artists who take a political stance, on the contrary. Art does not exist in a vacuum, and at times an artist's role is to respond to reality, to raise questions and to challenge the society from which they work. But I do have difficulty when the moral accounting becomes partial. To speak about Gaza, about suffering and about responsibility, without October 7 and without the hostages, is no longer a whole humanist position. And what troubles me even more: it seems that the international art world rewards exactly this discourse, and that to sit at the center of the establishment, Israeli artists are expected to perform a public reckoning, but one that speaks in the language the establishment already wants to hear.

I might be wrong. But this is the feeling I left with, and so, even though this is an artistically interesting exhibition, I cannot recommend it wholeheartedly.

And still, if you are in New York, it may actually be worth going. Not only for the art, but to ask yourselves: can an exhibition that deals with war and trauma allow itself to choose which traumas enter the frame and which remain outside it? And where is the line between art, political stance and moral responsibility?

📍 In a Free State, Luhring Augustine, 17 White Street, Tribeca.
📅 June 26 to July 31, 2026

There are exhibitions you leave with a list of works you loved.

And there are exhibitions you leave with a new way of looking.

This is one of those.

About two weeks ago, the Metropolitan opened, for the first time in its history, an exhibition devoted entirely to the idea of Orientalism: the way European artists of the 19th century imagined, described, and painted "the East" (the Middle East, North Africa, and parts of Asia). People of culture and scholarship were fascinated by the Orient, but they also created an image of an East that was exotic, mysterious, sensual, and at times wild. Often, that image said no less about Europe than about the East itself, since it reflected the curiosity, the fantasies, and the power relations of the era, and also the way Europe chose to see the "other". Because in the end, every gaze tells a story not only about what is seen, but also about who is looking.

While I wandered among the works, my mind actually drifted home. To the Mahane Yehuda market and the Old City of Jerusalem, the city of my childhood, to the colorful tiles of Jaffa and the Negev, and to the blazing, blinding sunlight of Israel. Everything on the walls no longer felt like an image of a faraway place. It felt familiar. Not because it was my reality, but because some of the works reflected fragments of landscapes I grew up beside, and they still live in my memory.

That led me to reflect on the exhibition's title: Between Fact and Fantasy. Suddenly it felt like far more than a title.

The exhibition does not try to decide whether Orientalism was truth or fantasy, appreciation or condescension. It shows that all of these existed together. It examines the complex relationship between Europe and the East in a period when colonialism, trade, travel, technological developments, and the exchange of ideas ran in parallel and shaped one another.

One of the moments I loved most was the encounter with the works of Osman Hamdi Bey (above), an Ottoman artist who studied painting in Paris in his youth, but returned to Istanbul and painted most of his works there. Unlike European artists who painted the East from the outside, sometimes without ever having visited it, he used the very European artistic language he absorbed in Paris to paint his own world.

At that moment you can no longer speak only about the question of who was looking at whom. The boundaries begin to blur.

Suddenly it is no longer only the West gazing at the East.

The East begins to gaze back.

In the end, I understood that this is not an exhibition about the East.

It is an exhibition about gazes.

🖼️ Orientalism: Between Fact and Fantasy
📅📍 The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Through February 28, 2027

One of the artists most identified with Orientalism is the French painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. Although he never visited the Middle East, he built his image of the "Orient" out of imagination, literature, and objects he knew in Paris.

In his painting La Grande Odalisque (1814) he presents a nude woman reclining in an imaginary harem, surrounded by luxurious fabrics, a pipe, and a fan. It is not an attempt to document reality, but a European fantasy of the East.

By contrast, the women of Osman Hamdi Bey are not painted as objects of the male gaze. They read, study, pray, and go about everyday life. They are the central figures of their own story.

The same artistic language. The same period. But the question "who is painting?" changes everything

Exactly 60 years ago, the Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti passed away. His sculptures, which became one of the most recognizable symbols of modern sculpture, reshaped the way we think about the human figure.

Giacometti was already a successful artist in his lifetime, but over the past decade and a half the value of his works has soared, and some of his sculptures have sold for more than $100 million. His human figures, thin, elongated, and fragile, became his signature, but for him they were never just a style. They were his way of exploring one of the questions that occupied him throughout his life: what is human representation? And yet his figures were given no identifying features. They belong to no age, social class, or ethnicity. They are universal, timeless, and manage to represent the human being as such.

About two weeks ago, one of the most intriguing exhibitions of the summer opened at the Metropolitan Museum in New York: 17 Giacometti sculptures installed inside and around the Temple of Dendur, one of the museum's most impressive spaces.

The choice is not accidental.

Giacometti's sculptural language was born, to a large extent, out of a deep familiarity with ancient Egyptian art. When he arrived in Paris in the 1920s, he spent long hours in the Egyptian galleries of the Louvre. His drawings and studies from that period show an ongoing engagement with the way the Egyptians depicted the human body: monumental, symbolic figures that are at the same time full of human presence.

Now, inside an Egyptian temple from the first century BCE, stand 17 of Giacometti's works, among them Woman Walking (1932) and sculptures from the Women of Venice series (1956). His elongated figures face the figures carved into the temple's stone, and a fascinating dialogue emerges between two artistic worlds thousands of years apart, both engaged with the same basic question: how do we represent the human being.

As the curator of the Giacometti Foundation in Paris put it:
"Egyptian art resonated with Giacometti's constant search for monumentality and humanity at once."

This is not just an exhibition of sculptures. It is an experience of space, light, and scale, in which every movement of the visitor changes the relationship between the works and the temple.

Even if you have visited the Met before, this is a rare opportunity to see one of its most iconic spaces from a new angle.

📍 The Met Fifth Avenue, New York
📅 Through September 8, 2026

Hi everyone,

Today's post is dedicated to the members of our community who are in Israel 🇮🇱

Fresh Paint opens today, one of the art events I love most and look forward to every year. This year the fair marks its 14th edition, and it continues to be one of the most intriguing and influential events in the Israeli art and design field.

As someone who has been following the art world for years, one of the things I love most about Fresh Paint is the chance to discover Israeli artists who are not yet on every radar. More than once I have met artists there at the very start of their careers, and then, a few years later, seen them showing in leading galleries, museums, and private collections. For me, that is one of the reasons this fair remains so relevant and exciting after so many years.

Beyond the works themselves, Fresh Paint is a place where you can feel the pulse of the local scene, see what is occupying artists today, which materials and ideas are taking hold, and how art responds to the reality around it. Alongside contemporary art you will also find design, special projects, social initiatives, and collaborations that expand the conversation beyond the gallery walls.

If you are in Israel in the coming days, love art, are interested in collecting, or simply enjoy discovering new artists, I warmly recommend a visit.

And if you go, tell me which works or artists caught your eye 🎨✨
The fair runs through June 29.
freshpaint.co.il

Today I want to recommend three especially worthwhile exhibitions in New York, each of which uses a different historical artistic tradition to engage with contemporary questions. Despite the differences between them (enormous ones, it must be said), all three show how visual languages from the past can remain relevant, alive, and thought provoking today.

🌺 Fred Tomaselli | Blooms Disrupted

📍 James Cohan Gallery
🗓️ Through June 27, 2026

In his new exhibition, Blooms Disrupted, Fred Tomaselli takes the idea of the garden and breaks it apart into an almost psychedelic visual world. The works were inspired by the garden Robert Irwin designed at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. Irwin saw the garden as a living work of art and not merely landscape design, and that idea of constant change and shifting visual perception echoes through Tomaselli's works as well.

The paintings explode with color, repeating patterns, and geometric forms, moving ceaselessly between order and chaos. The result is kaleidoscopic compositions that weave motifs from nature together with abstract structures, creating an almost hypnotic sense of motion.

Alongside the paintings are collages built from pages of the New York Times. The joining of the everyday news world with an imagined, botanical landscape raises questions about the relationship between nature, information, and media noise in the current era.

🌄 Whitney Bedford

📍 Miles McEnery Gallery
🗓️ Through June 20, 2026

Whitney Bedford, an American artist living in Los Angeles, is an excellent example of contemporary Romanticism (influenced by the Romantic movement of the 19th century). Bedford combines the classical landscape painting tradition with a painterly language marked by flattened space and reduced perspectival depth. She draws inspiration from Renaissance paintings and idyllic landscapes of the past, but unmistakable signs of the present soon break into them: neon sunsets, roads, geometric shapes, contemporary architecture, and the palm trees of Southern California.

The result is a landscape that moves between beauty and a persistent hint of instability. Alongside the romance of nature there is a sense of environmental crisis, shaped in part by the great fires that struck Los Angeles in January 2025. Bedford uses landscape not only as a painterly subject but as a tool for thinking about how climate change is reshaping our relationship with the natural environment.

🪞 Arghavan Khosravi | What Remains

📍 Uffner & Liu Gallery
🗓️ Through July 2, 2026

Last but not least, and to my mind the most interesting, is What Remains by the Iranian artist Arghavan Khosravi. Khosravi builds a world that looks like a many layered dream; she combines the Persian miniature tradition with structures associated with medieval European altarpieces, creating rich compositions in which revealing and concealing happen at the same time. Doors, curtains, and ropes appear again and again in her works, hiding parts of the image and exposing others. Many female figures are only partly visible, as if caught between presence and absence.

Khosravi, who now lives and works in Connecticut, uses this visual language to explore the experience of women living under restrictive political, cultural, and religious systems, and the constant tension between visibility, control, and freedom.

Three exhibitions, three visual languages from the past, and three different ways of looking through them at the present. Which one intrigues you most? 🤍

Yesterday we lost one of the most iconic and influential artists of our time, the British artist David Hockney.
Hockney created for more than six decades and kept working almost until his very last day.

Throughout his career he never stopped reinventing himself, exploring, and pushing the boundaries of the medium; from painting and drawing, through photography and printmaking, to digital work on the iPad.

He became famous for his singular visual language: intense color, dazzling California light, bold compositions, and above all his iconic series of pool paintings, which became an inseparable part of the canon of modern art.

But beyond the aesthetic identified with him, Hockney was an artist of observation. An artist who worked in situ and knew how to take everyday moments, a landscape, light, or human intimacy, and turn them into a deep and unforgettable visual experience.

His legacy is a reminder that great art does not merely document the world, it changes the way we see it.

New York's art world has a little secret: some of the most intriguing contemporary art in the city is not shown in museums or galleries at all, but hides in the luxury jewelry houses of Fifth Avenue ✨

The first institution is Tiffany. From its earliest days, Tiffany has taken an active part in the art world. Its founder, Charles Tiffany, was a patron of the Metropolitan Museum and a founding member of New York's fine arts society. His son, Louis Tiffany, was one of the central artists of American Art Nouveau. Know the Tiffany lamps? 🙂

In Tiffany's Fifth Avenue flagship you will find an especially impressive art collection, including the famous Basquiat painting from the Beyonce and Jay-Z campaign. Alongside it are works by leading American artists such as James Turrell (who truly deserves a post of his own), Rashid Johnson, and more.

The interplay between art and fine jewelry does not stop at Tiffany. The Italian house Bulgari also boasts a close bond with the art world. As of this year the company has become an official partner of the Venice Biennale, it supports young artists, and it contributes substantially to the preservation of antiquities in Rome.

But the most intriguing connection is to the Pop artist Andy Warhol. Bulgari's jewelry of the 70s and 80s was directly influenced by Pop Art, and Warhol himself was obsessed with the brand and an avid collector of jewelry. He once said: “When I'm in Rome, I always visit Bulgari. It is the most important museum of contemporary art.” It is an interesting statement, because it unsettles the separation we usually make between art, design, fashion, and objects of desire. For Warhol, those boundaries were blurred anyway.

Another connection to art lives at Chanel. Coco Chanel was an obsessive collector of art and antiques. Her legendary Paris apartment was filled with art and cultural objects she collected. In that era, collecting art and objects from the East was considered the height of cultural sophistication and was a significant part of the influences on Western modernism, a phenomenon that began in the 19th century and continued deep into the 20th. That eclectic taste is present in Chanel's jewelry space today: part of the collection is displayed in the public space open to visitors, and part is reserved for private clients in the intimate rooms on the upper floor.

It may sound surprising, but perhaps it only proves that art, design, and luxury have always been interwoven.

Were you surprised by the connection between the two worlds? 💎🖼️

A short anecdote: Warhol once offered Nicola Bulgari, grandson of the house's founder, several of his paintings in exchange for Bulgari jewelry. Bulgari refused, and years later admitted it was the worst deal of his life 😅 Which is why, when the store reopened in 2017, three Warhol prints were hung in the VIP area.

🎶 Clinamen | Celeste Boursier-Mougenot at Park Avenue Armory 🎶

Tomorrow, one of the most hypnotic and talked about works of recent years opens in New York: Clinamen by the French artist, musician, and composer Céleste Boursier-Mougenot.

At the center of the installation stand enormous basins filled with water, on whose surface float hundreds of white ceramic bowls. A gentle current moves them slowly, and when they meet one another they produce delicate, unexpected sounds. These acoustic chimes, without any performer's intervention, are the very heart of the work; a true symphony of the moment, unfolding with the flow of invisible waves.

In this work, sound becomes living material and the visitor is invited to take an active part in the experience. The work's title, Clinamen, is taken from Epicurean physics and describes the random swerve of atoms, an idea that mirrors the ever changing nature of the installation. Every movement of the water creates a new encounter between the bowls, and every encounter gives birth to a different sound. In this way a living symphony is built, one that never repeats itself.

The work continues Boursier-Mougenot's long engagement with the border between art, music, and sensory experience. Everyday objects take on a new role here, and sound becomes genuinely sculptural material. Visitors are invited to wander through the space, slow down, and give themselves over to a moment in which time feels almost suspended.

In the new version presented at Park Avenue Armory, the installation fills the enormous Drill Hall and turns it into an acoustic, meditative landscape in which water, ceramics, architecture, and human presence meet in a delicate, ongoing dialogue.

📍 Park Avenue Armory, New York
📅 June 10 through August 26, 2026

This is one of those works that is hard to explain in words! You simply have to be there, listen, and drift. ✨

A recommended experience for kids too! 😊

This time I am taking us a little closer to home, to the town of Montclair, half an hour from us.

At the Montclair Art Museum, more than one hundred works from the private collection of Ann and Mel Shaffer are on view these days, a couple who collected contemporary art for more than four decades. But what makes this exhibition special is not only which artists are on the walls, but the way the art is displayed.

Serious art collectors usually own far more works than can be displayed at home, and rotate them from time to time. With the Shaffers the story is different. Over the years they acquired works that intrigued them, challenged them, or moved them, and not necessarily ones that matched market trends. Above all, they always lived with their art. They did not keep it in storage or hide it behind glass, they wove it into everyday life.

That is also why the exhibition does not feel like a typical museum show. The curatorial choice is clear from the very first moment: there are almost no labels or texts on the walls. Deliberately. That is what the Shaffers' home looks like too. The works are arranged according to how they were placed in the rooms of the house, and chairs are scattered through the gallery spaces, inviting visitors to stop, sit, and look. At moments you feel less like a museum visitor and more like a guest in a home full of art.

What stayed with me from the visit is the idea that art is not something you save for a special day. It is part of life itself. And although it is hard to ignore the monetary value of some of the works in the exhibition, collecting art is not reserved for the wealthy. It can begin with a photograph by a local artist you love, a small print you bought on a trip, or even a find in a neighborhood antique shop. The point is not prestige, but surrounding yourself with things that awaken emotion, thought, and curiosity in you. ✨

What not to miss in the exhibition?

🖼️ Untitled #408 by Cindy Sherman (2002), a work from a pivotal period in the career of one of the most influential artists of her generation.

🖼️ A 2018 work by Nick Cave, in which a bronze head is joined to a pile of United States flag shirts. One of the strongest presences in the exhibition.

🖼️ Jimmy Paulette and Misty in a Taxi, NYC by Nan Goldin (1991), a photograph that stays with you long after you leave the room.

If you are making the trip, it is worth combining it with a stroll through Montclair itself. ☕️ It is one of the most charming towns in New Jersey, with small galleries, cafes and restaurants, and a creative atmosphere you can feel on almost every corner.

A small tip: 📚 public library cardholders in our area can enjoy free museum admission for 2 adults, with children free.

📅 The exhibition is open through June 28, 2026

Continuing the critical conversation around the question "What is art?", it is hard to ignore the exhibition of one of the artists who, it can fairly be said, influenced the art world more than any other artist of the 20th century: the French American artist Marcel Duchamp. With thinking that was groundbreaking and radical for its time, Duchamp paved the way to a new era of creative freedom whose echoes are felt to this day. Through a wide ranging retrospective of some 300 works spanning six decades of creation, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) traces the path of an exceptional artist who chose not to belong to the artistic movements active around him, but to shape for himself a unique and independent artistic language.

Duchamp is identified above all with his readymades, everyday objects taken out of their original context and presented as art. The most famous of them is Fountain from 1917, a urinal submitted to an exhibition under a pseudonym, which changed the philosophical discourse around art from its foundations. The work raised deep questions about the boundaries of the medium, the role of the artist, the concept of originality, and the way we define a work of art.

Although the exhibition sets out to examine the scope of Duchamp's work in an almost research-like manner, a kind of vast laboratory, at times it feels as if its curators seek to re-present the figure of the artist more than to offer a new interpretation or a significant discovery about him. I especially liked the decision to include his early paintings, among them Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2) from 1912, since many people are unaware that Duchamp began his path as a painter. That said, I felt the absence of his kinetic and motion based works, which stood on the seam between object, movement, and perception, and expressed one of the central ideas of his art: art as experience, not only as object.

And still, the chance to see together such a broad body of work by one of the most influential and enigmatic artists of the 20th century makes this exhibition well worth your time.
On view through August 22, 2026.

If May marks the opening shot of New York's art season, June is the crown jewel for art lovers everywhere. The city's iconic museums and innovative galleries open their most intriguing and ambitious exhibitions, and the whole city floods with visual culture at its best ✨

One museum that deserves a post of its own is the Guggenheim, where the exhibition Pop: From the 1960s to Today opens on June 5. As its name suggests, the exhibition examines the ongoing dialogue between iconic Pop works of the 1960s and contemporary pieces acquired over the years, which continue to expand, unsettle, and update the Pop language.

The museum dives into its rich archive and presents works by the giants of the field, among them Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and Claes Oldenburg (a Swedish American sculptor known mainly for his environmental sculptures, giant versions of everyday objects. Another central motif in his work is soft versions of rigid objects), alongside groundbreaking contemporary artists like Maurizio Cattelan, to whom I will dedicate a separate post. Through its engagement with media, consumption, advertising, and mass culture, the exhibition revisits fundamental questions: What is art? Where does the line run between high art and popular culture? And what is the museum's role in defining what deserves to be called a work of art?

And as if that were not enough, the exhibition also includes one of Yayoi Kusama's iconic mirror rooms 🪩 an especially immersive, experiential addition that brings an almost infinite dimension of reflection, color, and image into the conversation on visual culture and consumption.

I have no doubt this is going to be a bold, colorful, smart, and experiential exhibition 🎨 and probably the one I am personally most looking forward to seeing in summer 2026.

Last week was one of the historic weeks in the world of the art market. But the sale is not the big story here.

🔨 Number 7A by Jackson Pollock sold at the auction house Christie's for $181.2 million!!! A new record, after Pollock's previous record stood at $61.2 million in 2021. But the story is not the painting. The story is what the sale reveals about the way a great collection is built.

Pollock is the American painter who invented drip painting: painting through movement, pouring paint directly onto the canvas laid on the floor. He shifted the art world's center of gravity from Paris to New York. This painting, from 1948, is one of the peaks of his career.

But the real story is who sold it. Sy Newhouse ran Conde Nast for 40 years and built his art collection on one simple principle: do not buy a lot, buy the best version of every artist he chose, and then do not be afraid to sell it when a better version turns up. He worked closely with the dealer Tobias Meyer for years on end to shape and edit the collection, and together with his wife Victoria invested over $700 million. Since his death, Meyer has been bringing the collection to sale in calculated waves, carefully, so the market is not flooded with iconic works all at once. After this sale, 47 works from the Newhouse collection have brought in over a billion dollars. For comparison: the Paul Allen collection, the largest ever sold, crossed the 1.6 billion mark in 2021. From 155 works. Newhouse: a third of the works, two thirds of the price. That is the result of high quality curatorial work.

christies.com: Jackson Pollock, Number 7A

From a post by ARTernative

When art, big money, and popular culture meet, you get the distilled drama that only the global art market knows how to deliver. This week we received a masterclass in how to turn a modernist sculpture more than a century old into a viral hit, and how a brilliant marketing campaign translates into millions of dollars.

It began with a short promo video produced by the auction house Christie's. On screen: Nicole Kidman, in Louboutin stilettos, striding confidently through the corridors of the company's headquarters, entering a private elevator, and revealing behind white curtains "Danaid" (named for the Danaides of Greek mythology), an iconic 1913 bronze head by Constantin Brancusi. The official goal was to build buzz ahead of the sale of the masterpiece, which came from the private collection of the late media mogul Samuel Irving Newhouse (who acquired it in 2002 for what was then considered a record sum: $18.2 million).

The result? On the evening of the New York auction, the hammer came down at an unfathomable $93 million. With fees and taxes, the final total reached $107.6 million, officially breaking the sculptor's auction record.

This story is a reminder that great art never operates in a vacuum; it lives, responds, and holds a dialogue with contemporary culture. It is a precise marketing move that brings us back, once again, to the conversation about the connections (fascinating, but not only that) taking place at the meeting point of history, art, contemporary culture, and big money.

Want to watch the video? Here is the link: youtu.be/nMDlal5tQP8

May is the biggest month for art in New York. New York's big art fair week closed last week, with fairs like Frieze Art, home to the city's biggest and most powerful galleries, intriguing fairs like NADA (New Art Dealers Alliance), a fair dedicated to young galleries, new voices, and experimental contemporary art, and the Independent Art Fair, a more intimate fair focused on curated presentations and quality solo shows. But the city is still full of exhibitions very much worth seeing.

The Frick Collection · Gainsborough

🎨 For lovers of classical art, The Frick Collection presents Gainsborough: The Fashion of Portraiture, which explores the connection between Thomas Gainsborough's portraits and fashion, status, and visual culture in 18th century England. A beautiful exhibition of stunning portraits, on view through May 25. In general, this is one of my favorite museums in the city, and it holds several masterpieces of art history. An impressive achievement for a relatively small museum.

The Metropolitan Museum · Costume Art

👗 And speaking of fashion, at The Metropolitan Museum of Art the spring exhibition has opened in the new Conde Nast galleries. Costume Art, from the museum's fashion department, sets out to examine the relationship between fashion and art through "the dressed body," presenting historical and contemporary garments alongside paintings, sculptures, and objects from the museum's collections. It is an especially impressive exhibition even for those who would not call themselves "fashion people," because it deals not only with clothes but with identity, body, representation, and visual culture. On view through January 10, 2027.

🖼️ The selection in the galleries right now is so good that narrowing it down was a very hard task, but here are the exhibitions I believe you must see!

Gagosian · Helen Frankenthaler

Gagosian presents one of the leading artists of 20th century American abstraction, Helen Frankenthaler, with 20 of her largest and boldest paintings. On view through July 2.

Hauser & Wirth · Firelei Báez

At Hauser & Wirth, among my favorite galleries in the city, are works by the Dominican artist Firelei Báez, known for layering fantastical figures over colonial maps and historical documents, and for the first time she will also show bronze sculptures. Through July 31.

David Zwirner · Gerhard Richter

At David Zwirner you will want to see the Gerhard Richter exhibition, one of the most expensive living artists in the world, with his blurred photorealist paintings alongside his abstract works. Today, Christie's holds an auction of the collection of the gallerist Marian Goodman, who passed away this past January at 97 and left behind an especially impressive art collection. Seven Richter paintings will be offered, and we may see a new record for the world's most expensive living artist.

Nino Mier Gallery · Jess Allen

Nino Mier Gallery presents Suspending Time by Jess Allen. Allen creates quiet, intimate figurative paintings, with figures, shadows, and psychologically charged spaces that feel almost cinematic. The feeling is of a moment between memory, introspection, and a sense of suspended time. On view through June 13.

Hello to everyone joining 👋

For those who don't know me, I am Stav Theodor-Kimhi, an art curator and advisor. I moved to Tenafly a year and a half ago with my husband and our two boys (5 and 7), and since then I keep discovering, again and again, how rich, intriguing, and endless the art scene in our area is.

I opened this group to bring some order and share the things that are truly worth knowing, without feeling you have to follow a million places or drown in information.

Every week I will share recommendations here for exhibitions, gallery openings, public installations, art fairs, museum events (for kids too), and anything that looks interesting and worth going out for. Sometimes it will be a long list, sometimes one precise recommendation, and we will see together where it goes 🙂

In the summer I will also share art recommendations in Israel, for anyone hopping over on a home visit 🇮🇱

Happy you are here, and the first post is on its way soon 🚀