5 Exhibitions To Visit In September
Alexandra Levin, art historian, art guide and DI art expert prepared her list of local exhibitions and cultural events that she highly recommends to visit in September!
1. The Medium and the Message: Six Centuries of Printmaking
Israel Museum, Jerusalem
The exhibition at the Israel Museum encompasses six centuries of printmaking, charting the medium’s rich history and examining its impact on art as a whole. Used at first to reproduce and circulate existing images, printmaking dramatically expanded the accessibility of visual culture. Very quickly, however, prints asserted themselves as independent art forms. Thus printmaking has uniquely provided both an affordable means of mass communication and a wealth of artworks for discerning collectors. Giving artists greater freedom to experiment with form, narrative, and content, the medium assumed center stage and in a sense became the message.
This exhibition showcases masters who shaped the evolution of printmaking, such as Albrecht Durer, Francisco Goya, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri Matisse, Andy Warhol and many others. Today, printmaking continues to serve as a dynamic platform for conveying personal creativity and cultural narratives. Presented on the occasion of the Israel Museum’s 60th anniversary and featuring more than 200 exemplary works from its collection, The Medium and the Message affirms the enduring significance of printmaking and its capacity to reflect, critique, and shape the artistic transformations of its time.
ADDRESS: Derech Ruppin 11, Jerusalem
2. Judy Chicago: What If Women Ruled the World?
Tel Aviv Museum of Art and Nassima Landau Gallery, Tel-Aviv
The first-ever exhibition in Israel by acclaimed American artist and feminist icon Judy Chicago, organized in joint collaboration between the Nassima Landau Art Foundation and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, will open on September 18 at two locations. Tel Aviv Museum showcases Chicago’s latest participatory project “What If Women Ruled the World?” and Nassima Landau Gallery presents her early works, alongside drawings and textile pieces.
Judy Chicago, one of the most influential figures in contemporary art, has inspired generations of women. Over six decades, she has engaged with gender, identity, the body, social and political justice, environmental awareness, and the rewriting of history from a female perspective. Chicago’s art is aimed at making women’s experiences visible, recounting and preserving their stories, and critiquing power structures and various forms of social injustice.
Chicago’s latest participatory project titled “What If Women Ruled the World?”, featuring the founding member of the activist group “Pussy Riot” Nadya Tolokonnikova, invites audiences worldwide to answer questions raised by the artists and to add their voices to a physical and digital quilt woven from the responses of all participants. After stops in the United States, Mexico, Argentina, the United Kingdom, France, and Germany, the project will make its debut in the Middle East. The Tel Aviv Museum of Art invites its viewers to step into an interactive booth, respond to questions, and take part in the work’s latest chapter.
In an exhibition surveying Judy Chicago’s sixty-year career, the Nassima Landau Art Foundation presents early works from a private collection that preceded Chicago’s breakthrough, alongside drawings and textile pieces from her iconic installation “The Dinner Party” and works exploring the artist’s Jewish identity. Focusing on Judy Chicago’s print-based works, the exhibition delves into the creative process of one of the most innovative artists of our time.
OPENING – Â 18.09.25
TILL 27.12.25
ADDRESS: Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Sderot Sha’ul HaMelech St. 27, Tel Aviv-Yafo
Nassima Landau Gallery, Ahad Ha’Am St. 55, Tel Aviv-Yafo
https://www.tamuseum.org.il/en/exhibition/judy-chicago-what-if-women-ruled-world/
3. New Exhibition Season
Mishkan Museum of Art, Kibbutz Ein Harod
Four new exhibitions of local artists, including three solo-shows featuring Didi Khalifa’s vases, Iddo Markus’s paintings, Assi Meshullam’s special project and one retrospective of the acclaimed Israeli artist Bianca Eshel-Gershuni.
The retrospective exhibition spans Eshel-Gershuni’s long career and includes her main bodies of work: from the early jewelry she created in the 1960s, to the large-scale sculpture and assemblage of the 1980s, as well as the vessels, reliefs and paintings from the 1990s to the digital paintings she created until her death in 2020. The show provides diverse readings to examine Eshel-Gershuni’s unconvensional and unique artstic language.
In his solo show “Acropolis” Didi Khalifa presents a series of vases in the ancient Greek style of “red-figure pottery,” created in collaboration with ceramicist Noa Platt. Khalifa uses classical vase shapes, including various types of amphorae for wine or oil, applies classical decorative elements to the vessels and adornes them with figures of centaurs. However Khalifa provides the centaurs with curly sidelocks, yarmulkes, and tefillin. He transforms them into “Hilltop Youth” figures and uses classical Greek visual language and symbols to ponder religious masculinity, heroism and violence as components of an extremist political identity.
The paintings in Iddo Markus’s new show “Agent Orange” are fragmented and include a collection of expressive images, reflecting the disaster, pain and anxiety of the current period. Alongside the paintings, Markus prints blown-up images from an archive he has been collecting for years. Form these images he extracts fragments, seemingly banal moments. The title of the exhibition references a herbicide produced by the United States Department of Defense, and used by the American military in the Vietnam War.
Over the years the artist Assi Meshullam has developed a private iconography that incorporates artistic, theological, philosophical, mystical, biographical, and psychological sources, and has produced a series of exhibitions, books, artworks and religious objects. In his current exhibition “Knowledge of the Serpent,” Meshullam reveals the “secrets of the world”, using Kabbalistic jargon and writing that resembles amulets, spells, and occult calligraphy. The point of departure is a book that Meshullam wrote. Alongside it, he creates a visual and thematic space full of secrets and encryptions.
THE EXHIBITION IS OPEN TILL 31.01.26
ADDRESS: Kibbutz Ein Harod Meuhad
4. New Materials
Artport, Tel Aviv
The exhibition “New Materials” brings together works of seven Israeli artists who have chosen to cultivate long-standing relationships with different primary materials, presenting in their practice as an active, leading partners. Through this encounter, they seek to illuminate and awaken the work with the material, proposing a model of ongoing intimate dialogue between the artist’s body and the medium employed. This chosen medium does not necessarily serve as a vehicle of expression, a conduit for ideas, or an inert mass into which they breathe life and form according to their will and imagination; it is an active entity, with intrinsic essence, a vital force in the creative process.
The works in the exhibition do not reduce reality to the medium from which they are made, but allow its conceptual and physical layers to draw on history, on past identities, and on the rebirth of the set of materials they comprise.
Participating artists: Gili Avissar, Zohar Gotesman, Ben Hagari, Gal Weinstein, Shahar Yahalom, Chen Cohen, Lihi Turjeman.
THE EXHIBITION IS OPEN TILL 11.10.25
ADDRESS: Haamal St. 8, Tel Aviv-Yafo
5. Handmade Japan
Tikotin Museum of Japanese Art, Haifa
Japanese art is essentially functional, and not just for display. The exhibition “Handmade Japan” focuses on a variety of creative endeavours that characterize Japanese artisanry from the past to the present, as expressed through diverse objects. Some of the objects displayed in the exhibition are from the collection of the museum’s founder, Felix Tikotin, and others are the handiwork of local craftsmen from Israel and Japan: Pavel Dibrov, an Israeli kumiko artist (wooden objects decorated with or composed of small pieces of wood); Mo Sela, an artist, carpenter, and musician from Israel; Nobuya Yamaguchi, an iron sculptor, musician, and musical instrument maker living in Israel; Dafna Kafman, a glass artist; Tim Oder, a folding paper artist; Yael Harnik, a textile artist; Saori Kunihiro, a calligraphy and scroll artist from Kyoto; Emi Nakamura, a mizuhiki artist from Tokyo; Simon Fujiwara, a visual artist from Germany; Ichika Yoshida, a calligraphy artist from Tokyo; tops by the master Masaaki Hiroi and selected textile pieces from Adina Klein’s Collection among others.
The museum walls display photographs taken by French photographer Pierre-Élie de Pibrac during his eight-month journey in Japan, through which he immortalizes Japanese aesthetics in everyday life.
THE EXHIBITION IS OPEN TILL 11.01.26
ADDRESS: HaNassi Blvd 89, Haifa
https://www.tmja.org.il/eng/Exhibitions/11651/HANDMADE_JAPAN
I’m Alexandra Levin – an art historian, art tours guide and Israeli art lover. I have a Master Degree of Arts in Art History (Tel Aviv University), and for many years conduct art tours in Israeli museums, art galleries, artists’ studios and private collections, give lectures and promote Israeli art to a Russian-speaking audience.
Find my upcoming art tours in the DI Events and on my Instagram https://www.instagram.com/levi_lex/
Stay tuned for the next recommendations of the local exhibitions and arts events!