It is doubtful whether the local landscape could have ever been perceived as a purely natural or aesthetic form, let alone at present. It is a terrain imbued with conflicts over ownership, identity, and power. The three artists featured in this exhibition—Nurit David, Shabtai Pinchevsky, and Talia Israeli—deconstruct the familiar image of the landscape to reconstruct a new one from its fragments. By employing materials and techniques that disrupt our expectations of traditional artistic and cartographic landscape representations, they reveal alternative scenic realms: hushed, far-removed, and estranged.

This is the third in a series of group exhibitions exploring resistance, deconstruction, and political imagination. The first, “Barricades,” opened in 2023 and featured works by Absalon, Gaston Zvi Ickowicz, Shahar Yahalom, and Saher Miari. The second, “Looking Back to the Future,” opened in 2024 showcasing artists Hamody Gannam, Thalia Hoffman, Mushon Zer Aviv & Shalev Moran, Omer Krieger & Hillel Roman.

Nurit David

In a series of large-scale, colorful oil paintings from 2000-01, dense in detail and devoid of perspective, Nurit David recounts a concentrated story of landscape. “I would like the story to be written, or literally inscribed, within the body of the landscape,” she says, likening the painter’s labor to that of a farmer, as both shape the land.
Her landscapes emerge from an assemblage of photographs she shot in the Jerusalem vicinity, combined with landscape fragments culled from Renaissance paintings, chiefly Crucifixion scenes. These 16th-century works are ostensibly set in the same Jerusalem terrain, though painted by artists who had never laid eyes on the landscape David photographs repeatedly in 2000. Captivated by these Renaissance paintings, David inserts them into the local scenery, imposing broader contexts onto local history, and a gaze that is both internal and external.
In Landscape no. 7, she depicts a view of Lifta—a Palestinian village whose residents were expelled in 1948, later settled by Jewish immigrants living in harsh conditions, and eventually designated a nature reserve. At the heart of this politically-fraught landscape, David introduces a fantastical detail from a painting by Hieronymus Bosch: a jug that is also a treehouse, flanked by trees taken from a work by Albrecht Altdorfer. In Landscape no. 14, she places rocks from a painting by Joachim Patinir and a tree lifted from Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece into the view from Mount Scopu.

Talia Israeli

Talia Israeli’s point of reference to the local landscape in her last two painting cycles is a series of history and geography—yedi’at ha’aretz (“knowledge of the land”)—books from the 1970s published by the Israeli Ministry of Defense, including the lexicon Every Place and Site. Common on Israeli bookshelves until the 1990s, these volumes played a formative role in fostering a deep-rooted bond with the land. They feature black-and-white photographs of the country’s vistas, natural landmarks, and archaeological sites. Unlike the actual landscape, however, which is difficult to view without recognizing—or at least imagining—borders, battlegrounds, abandoned villages, and ruined monuments, the local landscapes in these books are emptied of human presence and marked by epic detachment. These monochromatic landscapes contributed to the myth of the Land of Israel and the historical bond with its terrain and landscape.
In her previous series, Every Place and Site, Israeli studied the historical landscape photographs, focusing on the dramatic and traumatic aspects absent from them, and painted new landscapes that exposed the mechanisms of representation, while striving to re-see the natural landscape itself. Her new series debuting in this exhibition, Wind-Borne Matter, emerged from an attempt to peel away another layer of cultural construction from the overly familiar landscape, removing its mythological aura and theological associations. She turns to a scientific study of Israel’s geomorphology, drawing on technical illustrations of the terrain’s surface. Seeking a way to either withdraw from or move closer to the landscape until it becomes unrecognizable, Israeli returns to its most elemental units. The paintings depict discrete landforms and natural phenomena, as she explores the possibility of assembling them like Lego pieces to build an entirely new landscape. These ideas of reduction and abstraction are echoed in Israeli’s chosen technique: pencil lines and spray paint applied quickly, with seemingly casual strokes, on wooden panels or bare walls. The landscape, subject to such reduction, strives to emerge in its most refined form, yet in the process becomes estranged from itself, transformed into an other.

Shabtai Pinchevsky

One of the core principles of the unique discipline known as yedi’at ha’aretz—knowledge of the land of Israel—a field developed by local tour guides in the early 20th century, blending the scriptures, geography, archaeology, history, botany, and folklore—was the manner in which this knowledge was to be acquired: “by foot,” that is, through active walking across the land. Shabtai Pinchevsky traces the Zionist journey along the land’s trail system as charted in textbooks, annual school hikes, and youth movement treks—avenues through which generations of Israelis were taught to experience the landscape—while inquiring into what remains out of sight.
In The First Trail, Pinchevsky follows the first trail marked in the former territories of Palestine, in the Ein Feshkha area above the Dead Sea—a route that has witnessed dramatic changes in landforms, sea level, and surrounding infrastructure since its initial inauguration. From the outset, the ideals of “knowledge of the land” were tinged with military purpose. Photographs taken by early hikers doubled as reconnaissance images for the Haganah and Palmach, whose goal was to map the region in preparation for a future war. Indeed, just one week after the trail-marking began in November 1947, the effort was abruptly halted by the outbreak of war on November 30—the day after the UN partition plan was approved by the General Assembly, and the area passed into the control of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, remaining so until 1967.
For about a year, Pinchevsky documented the trail’s evolving topography, re-mapping it using photogrammetric scans derived from images captured while walking its course back and forth. The work unfolds through two modes of documentation: video and two-dimensional renderings. Unlike conventional camera photography, which is always limited, revealing only what the infrastructures allow us to see, scanning is not subject to these obstructions of the gaze, exposing what lies beyond the reach of the eye or the lens.
Pinchevsky deliberately avoids conventional landscape photography, where historical, military, and social resonances are already embedded. Instead, his works present an estranged landscape, rendered in unfamiliar hues and impossible to pinpoint, stripped of any detail that might evoke the known sensations of hiking through the Israel’s trails. More than anything, the video recalls a moonwalk, and the color scans conjure telescopic views of distant planets. By distancing the landscape from our habitual ways of seeing it, Pinchevsky challenges the very mechanisms by which we have learned to recognize it and to cement our sense of belonging to it.

Karmit Galili

About the artists

Nurit David

Nurit David was born in 1952 in Tel Aviv, where she continues to live and work. She taught at the Art Teachers’ Training College (HaMidrasha – Beit Berl) and in the Department of Art at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem. She completed her art studies at HaMidrasha and studied drawing at The Prince of Wales’s Drawing Studio in London.
David’s work is deeply biographical. Her early pieces were associated with the Israeli “poor art” movement, but from the early1990s onward she began creating figurative art with clear influences from Medieval and Renaissance European painting. Alongside her painting practice, she also explores digital drawing, textile prints, and garment-making – creating a compelling synthesis between traditional handcraft and contemporary digital tools. In addition to her artistic practice, David has published essays and articles in journals, catalogues, and books over the years.
Her works have been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in Israel and internationally. Solo exhibitions include Givon Gallery, Tel Aviv (2024); The Uri and Rami Nehoshtan Museum, Kibbutz Ashdot Ya’akov Meuhad (2021); Haifa Museum of Art (2015); Tel Aviv Museum of Art (2007). A dou-exhibition by David and Itzhak Golombek was presented at Bar-David Museum of Art and Judaica, Kibbutz Bar’am (2023). Group exhibitions include Galleria Mimmo Scognamiglio, Milan (2008); Gropius Bau, Berlin (2005); The Jewish Museum, New York (1998); Ackland Art Museum, North Carolina (1996); and the 21st São Paulo Biennale, Brazil (1991).
In recognition of her extensive body of work, David has received numerous awards, including the Rappaport Prize from the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Ministry of Culture, the Encouragement of Creativity Prize from the Ministry of Education and Culture, the Sandberg Prize from the Israel Museum, and more. Her works are held in major public and private collections.

Talia Israeli

Talia Israeli was born in Jerusalem in 1976. She lives and works in Tel Aviv and Herzliya. Israeli is the academic coordinator of the Fine Art Department at the Haredi Branch since 2020, and a faculty member in the Art Department at Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, where she has been teaching since 2006. She holds a BFA in Visual Arts from Bezalel Academy in Jerusalem and an MFA from Goldsmiths, University of London.
Israeli’s body of work ranges from oil-on-canvas representations of monumental places to spray-painting on the gallery wall and in the streets of the city, with the aim of reducing the gap between place and its representation, creating an active and reflexive fusion between them. She paints landscapes and urban spaces, figurative painting sometimes on the verge of the abstract, that entwines the painted environment with the properties of the medium and the act of painting, so that they are inseparable. Israeli focused on the connection between real living spaces and the ability of painting to capture and represent the moods and emotions that these spaces evoke. In recent years, Israeli has developed a unique painting method that combines her interest in meticulous, detailed description with a rougher application that corresponds to the language of graffiti, with the result leading to the relationship of painting with photography, ready-mades, and with a variety of mechanical representational tools such as Xerox.
Israeli’s work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions in Israel and internationally. Solo exhibitions include Gallery Be’eri (2023); Maya Gallery, Tel Aviv (2022); The Artists’ House, Jerusalem (2020); Ralli Museum, Caesarea (2018); Taylor Foundation, Paris (2017); Ashdod Museum of Art (2016). Group exhibitions include Spinnerei rundgang LIA, Leipzig (2025); Hangar Bicocca, Milan (2011); FA Projects, London (2004); Winzavod – Moscow Contemporary Art Center (2008).

Shabtai Pinchevsky

Shabtai Pinchevsky was born in London, UK, in 1986. He lives and works in New York, USA. He is Assistant Professor of Photography at Parsons School of Design, The New School, New York. Pinchevsky holds a BFA in Photography from the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem and an MFA in Art from Northwestern University, Evanston, IL.
Through photography, 3D modeling, mapping, web-based tools, and more, Pinchevsky investigates archival photographic materials and their relationship to geographies shaped by conflict and displacement—particularly in the context of Israel/Palestine. His work engages with questions of social justice and human rights, and with the broader implications of these themes within the fields of art and media.
His work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions in Israel and internationally. Solo exhibitions include Bezalel Gallery, Tel Aviv (2023); Space P11, Chicago (2022); Block Museum of Art, Illinois (2021); and Hadassah College, Jerusalem (2017). He has also participated in group exhibitions such as Singapore Art Museum (2023); Common Ground, Portugal (2023); and Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago (2022).