MAGAZINE
Life Is Short Even When It Is Long: A Space to Pause
In a noisy and fast-paced world, where pressure and overload have become inseparable parts of everyday life, the longing for spaces of stillness, slowness, and reflection grows ever stronger. The way we look at our home and our surroundings has shifted, and we find ourselves searching for anchors of stability, comfort, and belonging.
Life Is Short Even When It Is Long is a group exhibition presented this year at the Freshpaint Art Fair, featuring four artists and curated by Michal Krasny. The exhibition seeks to illuminate the value of small moments and our ability to discover meaning, beauty, and hope within a complex and challenging reality. This idea resonates throughout the works on view, revealing itself in different forms through diverse materials, subtle gestures, and personal voices that come together as an open and interconnected tapestry.
Merav Cohen , Studio Moments, creates works that preserve fleeting moments—real flowers transformed into enduring memories. Her process begins in the studio garden, where she cultivates and gathers local flora. Through a meticulous and traditional drying technique, she preserves each flower at the height of its bloom, transforming it into delicate, elegant, and timeless compositions. Rooted in a profound love of nature and the craft of preservation, each work stands as a tribute to the fleeting beauty of a flowering moment.
Merav Cohen
Through rich layers of oil paint, expressive brushwork, and the physical application of paint with palette knives, Tamar Green creates worlds born from memory, longing, and hope. The houses and landscapes she paints are not depictions of actual places but rather inner landscapes, spaces of contemplation, attentiveness, and emotional connection. Each painting emerges from a personal journey and seeks to meet the viewer at a meaningful moment, offering a sense of quiet, belonging, and the feeling of being at home.
Tamar Green
For the past decade, Linoy Landau and Dror Kalish have worked together under the brand GATHERING, creating projects that move fluidly between design, art, and architecture. The embroidered works presented at the fair for the first time, emerge from an ongoing dialogue between photography, technology, and craftsmanship. Dror’s botanical photographs are transformed through AI-based tools into watercolor-like images. These are printed onto fabric and become the foundation for Linoy’s embroidery practice, an intuitive and free process that combines traditional & contemporary textiles.
Linoy Landau and Dror Kalish
At the heart of these works lies a deliberate embrace of imperfection: the handmade gesture, the subtle deviation, and the unfinished edge. Through this approach, the artists engage with ideas of vulnerability, acceptance, and inclusion within a complex reality, while preserving a sense of tenderness, compassion, and beauty.
Curator Michal Krasny reflects on the collaboration: “Although the four artists were not deeply familiar with one another’s practices, the connection between the works was immediate. Much like life itself: moving between fleeting moments and memories that remain with us for years, each work contains a complete world of its own while simultaneously resonating with those around it. For this upcoming exhibition at the fair, it was important to highlight the meeting point between traditional craftsmanship and contemporary visual language, between memory and material, between inward reflection and the surrounding world. Through this encounter, we hope to create a space that invites viewers to pause, to look again at the familiar, and to remember that even within the fragile and transient nature of everyday life, there is depth, beauty, and meaning.”
The exhibition title is borrowed from the poetry collection Fold (Kefel) by Agi Mishol.
Michal Krasny is an independent curator who has worked in recent years across a wide range of artistic frameworks, curating both solo and group exhibitions in galleries, museums, and alternative art spaces throughout Israel. This is her second year curating a group exhibition at the Freshpaint Art Fair.
In her curatorial work, Michal is particularly drawn to projects that explore the botanical world, nature, and the complex relationships between people and their environments. It was therefore a natural choice for her to curate artists whose works approach botanical subjects with such sensitivity and attentiveness.
Freshpaint Art & Design Fair takes place on June 24 – 29, 2026, at the Kremenetski Technical Center, 7 Kremenetski St., Tel Aviv.
The exhibition is on view at Booth P11.
