Image: Beyt Haomanim, Tel Aviv-Yafo
Yitzhak Jacobs’ new exhibition 'Zemayesh' opens at Tel Aviv Artists House on August 13 and runs through September 5, presenting paintings rooted in recent Israeli realities. According to the institution’s exhibition text, the works draw on the country’s past year and turn to scenes of protests, refugees and migrants, residents in Jaffa, and anonymous figures moving through the city.
The show is presented as part of a wider August lineup at Tel Aviv Artists House, but the gallery page for 'Zemayesh' frames Jacobs’ project on its own terms. The title, rendered as 'This Is What Is' in the Hebrew material, signals what the institution describes as a sober stance: not an attempt to beautify events or offer solutions, but to look directly at the local present, with its tensions, contrasts and social fractures.
Jacobs is described by the venue as a figurative painter who works from photography and street views. In this new body of work, a photographed moment becomes, in painting, a charged image that extends beyond the event it records. The source text emphasizes the movement between documentation, memory and imagination, suggesting that the paintings are shaped as much by interpretation as by direct observation.
The exhibition description says the paintings include mass demonstrations, refugees and migrant workers living in South Tel Aviv, Arab residents of Jaffa set against neglected housing, tattooed young people and unnamed urban passersby. Taken together, these scenes form what the gallery calls a broad mosaic of Israeli society and its many faces. The works are positioned as close, unsentimental observations of everyday life rather than overt political statements.
The exhibition material also stresses Jacobs’ refusal of direct moralizing. Instead of isolating the exceptional, the paintings are said to search for the human within each scene, keeping the figure at the center of the image even when the background is charged with social or political tension. In that sense, the show is presented as a visual record of time and place that remains open-ended rather than summative.
'Tzemayesh' is curated by Arie Berkowitz. It opens on Thursday, August 13, 2026, at 7 pm and closes on Saturday, September 5, 2026, at 2 pm. The exhibition is listed at Tel Aviv Artists House, 9 Elcharizi Street, Tel Aviv-Yafo, with free admission.
