Northern Horizon: A New Perspective on 1970s Landscape Painting in Israel (2026)
Group Exhibition: Special Project

Excerpt about the work from the exhibition catalogue, by curator Dr. Kobi Ben-Meir:

“Karen Dolev replicates the shape of the windows overlooking the landscape in five large-scale pastel-on-paper paintings. In Climate, she creates five alternative windows opening onto an emotional-natural landscape. The climate is external: changing lighting conditions produce varied colors, and Dolev explores the color of light and the quality of the interaction between hues. The subtle transitions between different lights evolve into a colorful landscape composed of soft, delicate color fields. Drawing on various mystical and religious traditions, different colors are associated with specific organs of the body and with physical and spiritual energies. In yoga, for example, red is linked to the root chakra, to grounding forces and fertility, while purple corresponds to the crown chakra, to cosmic energy and spiritual consciousness. In Jewish Kabbalah, too, color symbolism is used to characterize the Sefirot and to express aspects of the divine. In Dolev's color fields, the climate is also internal, reflecting states of mind, bodily posture, and spiritual awareness.”

From the exhibition text:

“The 1970s are generally remembered as the heyday of conceptual art in Israel, an art form that transformed the visible world from perceptual forms into abstract ideas; a decade in which the distance between what was happening here and what was happening in New York seemed to shrink, while the distance between the studio where the artists worked and the surrounding landscape widened. The prevailing narrative in Israeli art research of this decade has consistently identified two centers: Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, which shared a rejection of oil-on-canvas painting and preferred thought over sight as basis for artistic practice.

The Haifa Museum of Art collection, which provides the foundation for this exhibition, reveals a very different 1970s: years of richly colored oil painting, whose forms are grounded in the visible place. The artists whose works are featured here all observed the local landscape closely, rendering it while applying the lessons of contemporaneous international art. They demonstrate a profound internalization of these tendencies that sought to reduce artistic expression to uniform color surfaces and abstract, universal forms, while infusing it with local content and conceptualizing the very essence of the landscape. Their work probes the Israeli place, grapples with the trauma of the Yom Kippur (1973) War, and outlines connections between the material painting and abstract, sublime spiritual realms. In doing so, the exhibition introduces a third school into the history of 1970s Israeli art: northern in character, whose members were bound by professional and personal ties, and whose sphere of activity extended between Haifa, Kibbutz Kabri, Safed, and Ein Hod.

The works from the 1970s are joined in the current exhibition by three projects from contemporary artists, whose underlying logic remains painterly, even though they materialize through drawing, installation, and video. These projects underscore the significance of the painting legacy of the 1970s, a legacy that struck deep roots in the history of local art, and continues to nourish contemporary practice, attesting to an ongoing artistic effort to explore affinities with Israel’s beautiful yet complex landscape.”

Participating Artists: Ori Reisman, Michael Gross, Hannah Levi ,Rachel Shavit, Eliyahu Gat, Yehoshua Grossbard, Batya Grossbard, Hanna Megged, Claire Yanive, Tova Berlinski, Angeline Issayick, Iris Cintra, Karen Dolev, Sigalit Landau.