Like artistic inspiration, art itself can be found in various spaces, not only in galleries and museums but also in places that we can connect with other social goals.
A prime example is a shopping mall, as in the case of the Second Biennale of Environmental Art, titled 50 Degrees in the Shade, at Dizengoff Center, which extends across the public space and roof of the mall.
The Biennale presents installations by Israeli artists responding to environmental issues, adapted to the site. For this column, I selected one presented there.
Art, less surprisingly, appeals to all our senses, especially when artists use different means of expression. This month, I turned to a multimedia artist, an installation artist, and a glass sculptor, whose artworks are currently displayed at museums, galleries, and public sites. In my opinion, their works cannot leave us indifferent.
Three Israeli artists answered my three questions:
What inspires you?
What do you call art?
What, in your opinion, makes your artwork different from that of other artists?
Yuval Avital (credit: Zohar Shemesh/’Alma Mater’ Opening, Israel Museum)
Yuval Avital
Yuval Avital, multimedia artist, composer, and guitarist, was born in Jerusalem in 1977 and has been based in Milan, Italy, for 20 years. He is often introduced as an Israeli-Italian artist, and as he said, this is probably the most accurate description.
He came to the visual arts scene in the last decade, beginning his artistic path with music. Avital has a BA in classical guitar and music from The Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance (2003), and continued his education in Italy, at Angelo Gilardino’s performers class (2007) and Conservatorio Verdi Milano, receiving an MBA in composition and new technologies (2010).
The rich spectrum of his artistic projects spreads, like in times of the Renaissance, but using modern art mediums. His exhibitions, installations, and musical compositions, including operas, have been featured in museums, theaters, cultural institutions, and industrial and archaeological sites worldwide (recently, in Beijing, China).
In his current installation, Alma Mater, at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, we can experience art through multiple senses. To some, his immersive conceptual work is experienced as healing. Avital, in search of the archetype of the mother, draws on thousands of hours of traditional chants, whispers, and tales by women from diverse cultures and periods, merging archival recordings and sounds from nature with cutting-edge technology, video, and artistic lighting to create an original piece.
Avital said that his creative practice functions as a chain of private and intimate, or public and collective art-rituals aimed at bridging the collective subconscious, hidden truth, and reality.
“This exploration delves into the dynamics between human and nature, hybridity and mystery, the inner child and ancestral connections, to rediscover lost connections within the intricate fabric of existence,” he explained.
Inspiration: “My inspiration is not a conscious act but rather the result of a deep process that works within me constantly, always, and everywhere. It’s as if, in parallel to the outside world, I have my inner world, populated with its own mythology, presences, actions, sounds, fears, and desires, which is always waiting to enter reality as a flow.
“Maybe that’s why my creations, even the most complex or large-scale ones, begin in a very immediate manner, quickly and intuitively. At the same time, I am always cycling around archetypes, structures, symbols, and the search for essentiality, truthfulness, memory, identity, and a deep connection with both nature and the hybridity of the artificial.”
Meaning of art: “I’d rather avoid defining art, but I can share that art saved my life. It is an absolute necessity to communicate things and emotions that I cannot express in any other way. If I didn’t have the opportunity to get them out, I would suffer a lot.
“On another level, I believe that art was born with and as ritual. Ritual bridging many sides of the self: conscious/unconscious, human/animal, individual/collective, private/universal. Modernity [modern times] has lost the sense of ritual, but I believe art can suggest it again, not as a religious ritual, which is exclusive by nature, but as an art-ritual: inclusive, open, plural, and uniting.”
Avital’s art: “My art aims to connect a hidden layer of truth and reality. It does not seek to conceptualize or deliver my opinions or reflections but rather to share – authentically and directly – an experience that comes from a relation, a dialogue, a research process, a symbol, a meta-theme, or something from my inner self that pushes its way outward.
“My works often manifest through a chorality [choir] of languages, [art] mediums, and spaces, and suggest a journey or an experience. While they offer an aesthetic experience, they are often rooted in an ethical perception of humanity – its interconnected destiny, its relationship with nature, and its ongoing struggle for freedom and expression. They sit within a dual condition: being part of existence and, at the same time, touching its outer limit.”
www.yuvalavital.com
Anat Weiss
Glass sculptor Anat Weiss was born in 1964 in Hadera; currently, she lives in Zichron Ya’acov and works at the Kibbutz Ein Carmel Artist Workshops Complex. Weiss creates small-scale sculptures, focused on unique glass texture. Her abstract and figurative works, pervaded with symbolic messages, are created through fusing and glass casting techniques, and are three-dimensional.
She described working with glass as challenging and fascinating. “Glass is a beautiful and clear material that possesses transparency and flow, but at the same time it is difficult to work and convey feelings,” she said.
Her sculptures give an outward sense of strength and permanence; but as they are made of glass, they remain fragile and vulnerable, requiring attention and care. The artist compared it to a human condition.
Interestingly, having a very defined artistic language, art is Weiss’s second career. At first, she worked as a pharmacist for many years, and 12 years ago she quit her job and decided to dedicate herself fully to art. She studied glass sculpting at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem (2014) and took a Petr Stacho Cutting and Polishing Glass class at The Glass Art School in the Czech Republic (2016), and studied with other glass masters in the US and Israel.
Asked about childhood experiences with art, she said that she watched her grandmother Leah make all sorts of crafts and handmade dolls, and she observed her father, Asher, at his carpentry work. The impact of these first inspirations, especially the carpentry, can be seen in the way Weiss treats the glass and sculpts in it. She said that she shapes from a block of glass as if it were a piece of wood or a stone.
Weiss had her first solo exhibition, Beyond the Fabric, at the HaMizgaga Museum of Glass, Nahsholim, in 2020, and has exhibited widely in group shows in Israel. Now her works are presented in the group exhibition Behind the Mirror, recently opened at Periscope Gallery in Tel Aviv.
She shows four works, among them White Dreams, in which she depicts an image of a glass blouse. “It serves as a bodyless shell, which forms a barrier between the woman and the world,” the artist explained. Weiss also shows her abstract transparent one-color and multicolored sculptures in the exhibition.
Inspiration: “My work is deeply rooted in life, drawn from personal experiences and the world I navigate as a woman. The themes I explore are closely tied to my journey, often sparked by emotional responses and the everyday realities that affect me. Much of what I create stems from things that provoke or unsettle me. In my series centered around women’s blouses, I use the garment as a metaphor to explore themes of gender, identity, and the human body. I also aim to push the boundaries of glass as a material, challenging its traditional qualities.”
Meaning of art: “Good art is about creating a connection between the viewer and the material. It sparks emotion, curiosity, and thought. Even when the response is negative, it shows that the work has made an impact – it has stirred something within the viewer. The beauty of strong art lies in its openness to interpretation; each person can find his own meaning in it, and that is where its true power lies.”
Weiss’s art: “My glass works are defined by their distinctive textures and invite quiet, prolonged observation. Through this process, the inherent contrasts and tensions within glass begin to surface – whether polished or raw, transparent or opaque, soft or rigid, cold yet solid. I explore and emphasize the complex, often deceptive nature of glass, highlighting its material qualities and layered symbolic meanings.
“Through a feminist lens, my work invites reflection on our relationship with the objects around us; how we define them and the meanings we attach to them. My art often reflects on motherhood, relationships, and the balancing act between career and family life.”
www.anatartglass.com/en/home
Tom Love (credit: Rona Cohen Love)
Tom Love
Tom Love was born in Herzliya in 1983, and from age 12 grew up in Emek Hefer; for many years, he has been based in Tel Aviv. He is an artist, designer, and artistic director of many projects. Raised in “an artistic home,” Love has a background in industrial design; he has a BA from the Holon Institute of Technology and an MA from the Bezalel Academy. He is the founder of Love Studio, a design studio based in Tel Aviv and Berlin.
His practice focuses on large-scale art and design in public and private spaces, emphasizing light, matter, and their relationship to space. “I’m drawn to the sublime and the unseen – to the laws of nature that exist in everything and yet are often forgotten in our current way of life,” he said.
Through installations and art interventions, he aims to create environments where viewers can pause, sense, and reconnect to these deeper natural rhythms. “In many of my works, light acts as both material and metaphor, a reminder of what is always present, yet often unnoticed,” he explained.
Love likes to work in artistic teams. Currently, two very different works of his are on view in distinct spaces in Tel Aviv.
The first, Pieces of Light, was created immediately after the massacre of Oct. 7 and is situated in Hostages Square. This installation, designed by Love and co-created with Keren Zach, is made of 244 mirrors.
This “was the number we’d heard at first as the number of kidnapped people. The piece was intended to show this number [of hostages] in one place; the mirrors are facing a common center, reflecting beams of light into the darkness. Sending hope… But also, in the mirror reflection, we can see our faces; it could be any of us [among the kidnapped],” he pointed out.
The artist provides a completely different experience and set of sensations with his work (in cooperation with Danielle Parsay – video mix, and Carmi Dror – video art) Layers of Change, the installation presented at the Environmental Art Biennale at Dizengoff Center, 50 Degrees in the Shade, which opened on April 6.
He said the message behind this work is raising awareness about the junk sent by us [humans] to the environment. The artist created a special lighting technique, based on profound research on projecting light on specific materials, such as delicate nets that he uses. Love spreads layers of light, and the visitors can walk inside the installation and almost feel the changing light. In my experience, it was almost magical walking through the sky.
Inspiration: “The sublime. The unseen. The laws of nature and their presence in everything. Their absence in our modern life and the deep human longing to reconnect with them. I’m inspired by the act of searching for those laws in light, in material, and in space. To use those very same natural principles in creation, to distill and offer them to the viewer.”
Meaning of art: “For me, art should prompt the viewers to remember – to remember that they know nothing, and that what they think they know often stands in the way of truly seeing the work.
“The role of the artist is to present a question. Whether simple or complex, the work should spark a personal, internal inquiry that has no single answer – an emotional, intellectual, and sensory response.”
Love’s art: “I create experiences. I aim to make hidden patterns visible – patterns that may be invisible simply because they are always present, like light itself. My goal is to generate a heightened moment in the viewer – a moment beyond words, one of pure experience.”
