Sixty years after the opening of the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, the museum's collection of Israeli art is receiving a fresh presentation – its first in nearly a decade.
The new display, titled Israeli Art – The Swing of the Pendulum, seeks to offer a multifaceted and more up-to-date perspective on local culture. Amitai Mendelsohn, senior curator of the Israeli Art Department and the exhibition’s curator, doesn’t strive to deliver a historical narrative or chronological journey but rather to listen to what Israeli art wants to say, or perhaps remain silent about, right now.
“You can't ignore the context and the time we live in,” says Mendelsohn. “Many works have taken on new meaning, especially in light of recent events.
"Many new works have been added, the reality has changed, and so has the art. The museum is not here to illustrate the status quo,” he adds, explaining that the last significant update to the exhibition was in 2015. “We want to create a trajectory that confronts a complex reality through three psychological realms: reality, hope, and spirit. This pendulum, swinging between the here and now, and the dream or escape from it, has always existed in Israeli art.”
The new exhibition represents more than just a shift in curatorial framing, says Mendelsohn. It rethinks how a permanent collection display can stir an emotional response.
The exhibition is arranged according to conceptual ideas: One wall showcases works that look directly at reality – violent, complex, painful, or ordinary. Another offers a contemplative, spiritual view. The third wall centers around a utopian and hopeful ideal.
In the first area, devoted to reality, the work of Zoya Cherkassky illustrates the difficult immigration from the USSR and tense encounters with Israeli society in the early 1990s. In her diptych painting Friday in the Projects; 1991 in Ukraine (2015), protests, poverty, and fear are shown side by side – but also moments of human, nearly everyday intimacy. “Zoya does what a true artist does: not telling just one story but dozens of stories simultaneously, with an amused yet compassionate gaze,” explains Mendelsohn. “The works look as if they were painted today – the Ukrainian backdrop, the threat of war from Gaza, immigration, and the dilemmas of identity, history, and class – all return in images that jolt you and evoke a smile in the same moment.”
Elsewhere in the exhibition, the work of Gil Shani, created in 2008 but not displayed until now, is featured. “It looks like a child’s drawing, but it shows something else – a kind of flat world that seems playful but is dark and ominous, with a lurking sense of anxiety beneath the surface,” the curator says.
Other works offer additional interpretations of Israeli reality, such as a pair of video works by Michal Rovner created in 2024 where slowly moving poppies serve as poignant symbols of heart-wrenching memory and loss; and Guy Ben-Ner’s video work from 2000, which relocates the story of Moby Dick into his home kitchen with a narrative that shifts from the grotesque to fatherly affection. “What’s beautiful about Guy is that he takes an enormous narrative and turns it into a domestic comedy. Everything happens between the sink and the stove, but the internal struggle is real.”
On the hope wall, early Zionist images stand out, such as Reuven Rubin’s iconic First Fruits (1923), which expresses a utopian vision, a dream of partnership, abundance, and eternal sunlight. Not far from it is a contemporary work by Gal Weinstein, which responds to his earlier works on Nahalal, yet now appears as a scorched earth, almost a shadow of memory. “This may be the hope that's already fading,” says Mendelsohn. “But even when it’s scorched, it’s still hope.”
In the central space, Michael Gross presents Jerusalem Light (1974), a minimalist and meditative piece that tries to transform the conflicted city into a sublime space. “Like a silence that signals something deep,” describes Mendelsohn. Alongside it, Arie Aroch’s work Agripas Street (1964) includes a Jerusalem street sign, with an abstract pictorial inscription. “Perhaps this offers a different vision of what Jerusalem could be,” Mendelsohn suggests. “Not a place of religious conflict but a space for personal and internal reflection tied to its collective historical past.”
In another section of the exhibition, perhaps the most complex, are attempts to reimagine home. One major work in this section is by artist Absalon (Meir Eshel), who earned global success before his untimely death in 1993. His minimalist capsule-like installation, a small, almost monastic house built with the intention of seclusion, invites contemplation. “This is a home that is both a tomb and a meditative space. It’s a proposal for an entirely different way of life,” explains Mendelsohn.
Next to it are works addressing the themes of home and memory: Maya Zack’s meticulous reconstruction of a Jewish home from Berlin, based entirely on a verbal memory turned into visual form; Ilit Azoulay’s photographic mosaic of an invented but familiar home; Micha Ullman’s table made of sand, with an empty space shaped like a basic house, that reflects on the gallery floor; and Nahum Tevet’s sculpture of a house that has broken off the wall or disintegrated.
Tamar Getter’s work takes us back to the early Zionist ethos through intense imagery of the Tel Hai courtyard painted in chalk, while Yehudit Sasportas places objects collected from the swamps of northern Germany on a table, objects that spin between magnets, creating a sense of tension, movement, memory, and loss. “One of the objects on the table looks like an ancient tree trunk, another like a bone. They move uncontrollably, and there’s something hypnotic, disturbing, and beautiful about it,” says Mendelsohn.
Maria Saleh Mahameed presents Ana Hoon (I Am Here) (2019), a deeply personal work born from a severe car accident, depicting her body and recovery journey using charcoal and displaying fingerprints and other traces of the artist's presence. “This monumental piece is both a battlefield and a canvas, both a life story and a portrait of a place – a personal collective journey of the artist from suffering to hope, from pain to healing,” says Mendelsohn.
A particularly intriguing piece by Irit Hemmo involves almost industrial-poetic processes. The artist recreated a composition by Kurt Schwitters, destroyed during World War II, using only dust to form the image. The result is a shadow of a previously iconic work, as if it passed through and left its mark on the wall.
Also on display is a 2005 piece by Efrat Natan, featuring a triptych of three hanging tank tops that transform into chilling corporeal imagery.
“The Israeli permanent exhibition is an attempt to portray the ambiguous Israeli situation that lacks a single direction – politically, culturally, or artistically,” concludes Mendelsohn. “It is precisely because of this lack that it has power. It reflects, debates, flees, fights, and dreams. And this, in my view, is what an exhibition should do – to be a space that encompasses all these voices, and reflects the pendulum movement we all live in today: between pain and hope, between anxiety, beauty, and healing.”
The Swing of the Pendulum, the new display of Israeli art at the Israel Museum, resonates as a testament to the enduring power of art to capture the restless spirit of a nation.
In collaboration with the Israel Museum
