Current Exhibitions

Meital Katz-Minerbo: Field Work  

Researched and curated by Drorit Gur Arie

Open to visitors from 18.8.25

Meital Katz-Minerbo, Botanical drawing, 2025, colored pencils on acid-free paper

In 1911, the Maidens' Farm (Havat Ha'alamot) was founded at Kinneret—a groundbreaking initiative by pioneering women of the Second Aliyah, who sought to integrate into agricultural labor and transcend the boundaries of traditional domestic roles. Led by figures such as agronomist Hannah Maisel Shohat, the Farm's founder, these women forged a new agricultural branch rooted in vegetable gardens and orchards, yearning for liberation, equality, and the realization of the Hebrew woman's revolution. The work of art questions what enters the gates of collective memory, and what is pushed aside, condemned to oblivion. The landscape becomes a site of memory and meaning, strata of a feminine past.

The multi-layered installation is entirely handwoven using a traditional rattan braiding technique, unfolding a garden shaped by a woman's hand: trees, flowers, fruits, and a bench. Within this space, where natural material is twined into fabricated structures, a quiet act of resistance resonates. Large-scale paintings inspired by early 20th-century garden plans devised by trailblazing European landscape architects and garden designers, such as Gertrude Jekyll and Vita Sackville-West, line the floor, echoing the visionary ideals

Meital Katz-Minerbo appropriates the historically male practice of botanical drawing to conjure up an imaginary feminine plant lexicon, challenging culture and gender boundaries and stirring repressed desires and latent yearnings. By braiding the pliant material, she builds wild structures that explore the interrelations between nature, body, and female identity, exposing mechanisms of exclusion.

*The Exhibition: Field Work supported by Outset Contemporary Art Fund.

Ruthi Helbitz Cohen: Olympic Village

Curator: Sari Golan

Assistant curator: Gili Zaidman

In the exhibition Olympic Village, Helbitz Cohen interlaces historical events with a personal narrative tinged with fantasy, staging an encounter between two seemingly parallel axes. She spins a new story—a narrative born of engagement with intergenerational trauma, unfolding into a succession of experiences shaped through a range of artistic languages.

The exhibition centers on a series of monumental collages painted over vintage advertising banners documenting Olympic Village in Germany prior to World War II. The large-scale banners were given to Helbitz Cohen by Jan Bejšovec, a Berlin-based artist and historian who researches the village's complex past and is currently building a historical archive on site.

For years, Helbitz Cohen’s artistic world has functioned as a kind of closed, self-sustaining system—an autarkic universe where symbols and figures are intricately woven through a distinct material language. In this exhibition, that closed circle is breached, and her visual idiom intersects with a foreign readymade photographic aesthetic that introduces a new thematic and material dimension into her work. The intersection of these two worlds calls to mind the notion of "thirdness," as articulated by feminist theorist Jessica Benjamin, among others: the potential emergence of a "third" space between analyst and patient—neither I, nor thou, but a shared entity born of the relational process through recognition of the other, representing both separateness and union. By conjoining polar forces—reality and fiction, victim and aggressor, the conscious and unconscious, the human and the mythic, virgin and wanton, the living and the inanimate—Helbitz Cohen summons an imaginary "third space" all her own.

Displaced

Anne Ben-Or / Alina Orlov / Alexandra Pregel

Curator: Dina Yakerson

Anne Or-Ben, Touching Distance, 2022, Oil on canvas. Photo credit: Avi Amsalem

The exhibition Displaced brings together three artists who never met: Alexandra Pregel (1907–1984), a painter raised and educated in Russia, who spent her life moving between countries before ultimately settling in the United States; Anne Ben-Or (b. 1965), a painter born in Belgium, who immigrated to Israel as an adult; and Alina Orlov (b. 1990), a video artist born in Moscow, who grew up in Israel, studied in the United States, and now lives and works in Montreal, Canada.

A common thread weaves their works into a shared tapestry of allegorical representations, directly and indirectly touching on the ruptures and rifts underlying immigration—an experience of leaving one place and transitioning to another. A coming-of-age story; an adventure laced with loneliness and pain.

The Hebrew title of the exhibition is a gender-reversed allusion to God’s command to Abraham in Genesis 12:1 ("Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house, unto a land that I will shew thee"). It echoes the journey undertaken by the artists in this exhibition; a voyage through which they are severed from one land and shifted to another, creating something new from the experience of displacement.

In Her Image: Works from the Zila Yaron Collection

Curator: Sari Golan

Assistant Curator: Dina Yakerson

research assistant: Neta Lanzman

Yohanan Simon, Girl With Orange Basket, 1953, oil on canvas (detail). Photo credit: Avraham Hai

Though not born of a preconceived narrative, the collection reveals itself as a rich, resonant whole, where guiding principles become apparent. The choices were made intuitively and emotionally, but a closer examination uncovers an intricate weave of values ​​and aesthetics. One of the collection's defining features is the integration of both established figures in the Israeli art scene and emerging voices, alongside artists working outside the mainstream. It moves freely between "high" art and design, craft, and ceramics, placing them side by side without hierarchy, in a visual and conceptual dialogue.

Zila Yaron's home served as an exhibition space, where installations reflected a unique artistic sensibility. Arrangements combining paintings, objects, and design pieces created environments that conversed with the architecture and with the life lived within it, challenging conventional boundaries between public and private, display and life. Thus, for example, masterpieces were hung in the bedrooms, while intimate or experimental works were displayed in the main living spaces.

Recurring visual and thematic motifs in the collection include portrayals of women by female artists alongside depictions by male counterparts; landscapes alongside interiors and representations of domesticated nature and interior vegetation. A significant portion of the collection is devoted to Israeli abstraction, primarily in painting. The persistent embrace of color—both as material and as emotion—attests to a deep affinity for the act of painting and a profound, unmediated love for art.

Yaron, who saw art as inseparable from her life, was far more than a collector. She immersed herself in learning, forged close bonds with artists, followed their creative processes intimately, and chose to invest specifically in local art. Her focus on Israeli art was not born of limitation, but of unwavering commitment to the culture of the place. The collection she left behind stands as a vital contribution to Israeli art, not only due to the quality of the works, but because of the spirit in which they were collected: with devotion, insight, intuition, and vision. Through art, Yaron preserved key chapters in Israeli culture, and her legacy continues to resonate.