The nonprofit gallery’s sixth annual online auction brings together emerging voices, mid-career artists, and major Israeli art-world figures in a broad, uneven, and revealing portrait of Israeli art now.

By Bonnie K. Goodman, BA, MLIS

Maya Gallery’s sixth annual online benefit sale is not a conventional exhibition, and it should not be read as one. Open for only five days from April 30 to May 4, 2026, the online sale gathers hundreds of works by Israeli artists across a striking range of prices, from accessible pieces under ₪2,500 to works priced in the tens of thousands. Its purpose is practical — to raise funds for the nonprofit gallery’s continued operation — but its interest goes beyond fundraising. The sale functions as a compressed snapshot of Israeli contemporary art: intergenerational, generous, market-conscious, uneven, and revealing.

Founded in 2018 by artists Michael Kovner and Avner Levinson, Maya Gallery is a nonprofit art space located in Kiryat Hamelacha, Tel Aviv. Its stated mission is to support contemporary Israeli art, emerging artists, intergenerational dialogue, and cultural programming beyond the traditional commercial gallery model. This year’s benefit sale extends that mission online, transforming the gallery’s community into a digital field of artists, collectors, supporters, and viewers.

In response to questions for this article, Neta Nachtomy (Gallery manager) and Nir Namir (Project Manager) of Maya Gallery described the benefit sale as “both a cultural anchor and an active, living platform within the Israeli contemporary art scene.” While the gallery’s regular work takes place in its physical space in Kiryat Hamelacha, they explained, the online sale allows that activity to expand into “a broader, more accessible sphere.”

Their most important point may be that the sale is not only about selling art. “The benefit sale is not just a fundraising event; it is a collective gesture,” they wrote. “It communicates that art here is built through relationships — between artists, audiences, and institutions that choose to operate as commitment rather than profit.”

That is a beautiful idea, but it is also a useful way to understand the sale itself. This is not a tightly curated museum exhibition. It is not a single-artist show, nor a gallery booth designed around one clean commercial argument. It is, instead, a dense online gathering: works by artists at very different stages of their careers, in different media, at very different price levels, brought together by a nonprofit institution asking the public to participate in sustaining Israeli art.

As with many benefit sales, the selection is uneven. Some works feel fully resolved; others read more like studies, fragments, small-format pieces, or generous studio offerings. But that unevenness is part of the point. A benefit auction is a meeting ground between artists, patrons, collectors, viewers, and an institution trying to survive while supporting culture. Its strength is not consistency, but range.

A sale built as an ecosystem

Maya Gallery confirmed that the artist selection this year emerged through a combination of direct outreach and artist initiative. The gallery approached artists it had worked with over the years, while other artists came forward out of a desire to participate and support the institution.

“The selection process is guided less by a single curatorial theme and more by a shared sense of trust and community,” Neta Nachtomy and Nir Namir explained. “The works were not chosen to illustrate a concept, but rather to reflect the breadth and vitality of the field itself. In that sense, the sale becomes a kind of portrait of an ecosystem — built collaboratively.”

That phrase — “portrait of an ecosystem” — is the key to the sale. It explains why the auction feels so broad. It includes long-established figures, younger artists, mid-career painters, photographers, sculptors, draftsmen, conceptual artists, and works that move between traditional genres and contemporary practice. It also explains why the price range is so wide. Maya Gallery emphasized that accessibility is central to the sale, not as a lowering of standards, but as a widening of participation.

“Bringing together established artists alongside younger voices creates a more dynamic and honest picture of the contemporary moment,” they wrote. “Offering a wide range of price points is essential. It allows new collectors to engage for the first time, while also inviting more experienced collectors to discover artists they may not yet know. Accessibility, for us, is not about lowering standards — it is about widening the circle.”

That widening circle is visible throughout the sale.

From affordable entry points to art-historical anchors

The lowest price bracket, up to ₪2,500, is not simply a bargain section. It includes accessible works, small works, drawings, studies, and repeated offerings by individual artists, but also serious names. Figures such as Rami Maymon, Avraham Eilat, Natalia Zourabova, Michal Heiman, Nurit David, Hila Lulu Lin Farah Kufer Birim, Jonathan Hirschfeld, and Avner Levinson appear in or around the lower price range. Their presence complicates any easy assumption that affordable means minor.

In this bracket, established artists may be represented by smaller or more modest works, while emerging artists appear beside them. That is one of the sale’s most interesting features. A charity auction can disrupt the normal hierarchies of the art market: a recognized artist may offer a small work at an accessible price, while a lesser-known artist may appear in the same visual field and benefit from the broader context.

The ₪2,500–₪5,000 category begins to feel like a serious entry point for collectors. It includes artists such as Gilad Ophir, Shai Yehezkelli, Itay Shmueli, Avraham Eilat, Ronny Almagor, Tamar Scheflan, Michal Biber, Eti Yacoby, and Aviv Keller. The prices are still accessible compared with the upper tiers, but the works begin to ask for more than casual support. They ask for attention to scale, finish, reputation, and visual force.

The ₪5,000–₪10,000 section moves further into collector territory. Here, the sale includes names such as Philip Rantzer, Orly Maiberg, Lee Yanor, Assi Meshullam, Michal Geva, Shai Yehezkelli, Itay Shmueli, Maya Gold, Shani Weiss, Daniel Oksenberg, Merav Sudaey, Dan Orimian, and others. At this level, the charity frame remains important, but it no longer explains everything. A ₪1,500 drawing may be acquired as an act of support or discovery. A ₪9,000 painting or mixed-media work asks for a different kind of confidence — in the artist, the image, the gallery, or the market.

The upper bracket, ₪10,000 and above, gives the sale its clearest art-world weight. Nahum Tevet, priced at ₪48,000, is the obvious anchor: a major figure in Israeli art history. Michal Na’aman brings conceptual-painting gravitas and an association with one of the most influential streams in Israeli art. Maya Gold appears at ₪37,000, while Anna Ayelet Eppel, Ofra Ohana, Daniel Tchetchik, Hilla Ben Ari, Liat Elbling, Alon Kedem, Shai Yehezkelli, Uta Patinkin, Shimon Pinto, Anna Lukashevski, and Addam Yekutieli/Know Hope all help give the top tier its contemporary density.

At this level, price is tied not only to medium or size, but to reputation, institutional history, market confidence, and the particular logic of a benefit sale. The buyer is not only purchasing a work. They are participating in an ecosystem of support.

What the works look like

Visually, the sale resists a single identity. There is abstraction and conceptual work, but also a persistent return to older genres: landscape, still life, portraiture, the nude, the domestic interior, the city street, and the human figure.

One thing largely absent is the slick, highly polished hyperrealism currently popular in parts of the American market and on social media. Realism appears, but rarely in that form. The representational works are more often painterly, tonal, atmospheric, academic, expressive, or psychologically charged. Even when the subject is recognizable, the image is often treated less as illusion than as surface, memory, mood, or sign.

There are many traditional still lifes: bowls, vases, cups, saucers, flowers, food, table settings, and domestic objects. In some works, this feels like a return to one of art’s oldest questions: how to look carefully at ordinary things. Amit Ida’s contributions show how a single artist can move between old and new still-life vocabularies. One work, “Rosh Hashanah Table” appears to return to the classical language of the tabletop — crystal glass, pomegranate, reflective surfaces, and symbolic fruit — while another “To Bobo” introduces toy-like collectible figures, cute and faintly unsettling, into the still-life tradition. If the flowers and bowls belong to the long history of still life, Ida’s doll-like objects belong to the age of collectible cuteness — adorable, commercial, and just a little haunted.

The nude also appears repeatedly. In works by artists such as Ofer Komem and Noa Shay, the body returns as an academic and expressive subject. In sculpture and object-based works by artists such as Itay Shmueli and Dan Orimian, the body becomes physical form rather than flat representation. In a sale otherwise full of abstraction, photography, landscape, and conceptual work, the nude functions almost like a reminder of older artistic tests: proportion, line, weight, gesture, and the complicated relationship between looking and being looked at.

Graphite and drawing also hold their own. Eli Brigitte Cartier’s graphite drawings are among the most traditionally realistic works in the sale, not in the glossy hyperrealist sense, but through controlled tonal discipline and old-master-like draftsmanship. They remind the viewer that careful drawing still carries authority, even in a contemporary art field often dominated by concept, installation, photography, or expressive painting.

Israeli streets, ordinary life, and the non-touristic landscape

Several works return to Israel not as symbol or tourist site, but as lived environment. This is one of the most compelling threads in the sale. Artists such as Eti Yacoby, Aviv Keller, and Michal Biber point toward a place-based Israeli painting tradition: streets, buildings, neighborhoods, interiors, skylines, and landscapes rooted in ordinary life rather than spectacle.

Aviv Keller’s apartment-building scenes practically announce urban Israel. In the Pinski Street scene, the subject is not scenic beauty but the familiar density of Israeli city life — apartment façades, compressed space, and the unglamorous but deeply recognizable architecture of the everyday. The work resists postcard imagery. It is not Jerusalem stone, Tel Aviv beach, or national monument. It is the Israel people actually live in.

Ayelet Berman’s landscapes and cityscapes also stood out for their color and sincerity. Her paintings do not seem interested in the familiar Israel of monuments and tourist views, but in streets, buildings, skylines, and lived places. That makes her presence in the sale especially resonant because Berman’s humanitarian work through the ADAMÂ Foundation also centers on home, land, displacement, and repair. Founded in 2020, ADAMÂ supports refugees who have lost homes, land, and traditions to violence and war, beginning with a bakery in Uganda’s Oruchinga Settlement Camp. Berman has described the act of breaking bread together as a way to create “a new narrative of community, healing, and an end to war.” In that context, her painted attention to place feels less decorative than ethical: a way of seeing land, shelter, and community as fragile but necessary forms of belonging.

Across the sale, this becomes one of the deeper tensions. Some works recall classical European art history through still life, the nude, portraiture, and mythological garden imagery. Others belong more clearly to modern and contemporary modes: abstraction, photography, mixed media, conceptual image-making, and socially engaged practice. Running through all of it is a specifically Israeli register — apartment buildings, local streets, harsh light, ordinary interiors, domestic objects, and figures embedded in the social texture of Israeli life.

The most interesting works are those that do not simply imitate European tradition or perform Israeli identity, but allow the two to collide: old genres reappearing inside a contemporary Israeli visual world.

Standouts and visual encounters

Among the works that linger, Merav Sudaey’s Wolf Woman stands out as especially haunting. The overlay of the wolf onto the woman’s face creates an image that is at once symbolic and confrontational. What gives the piece its force is the woman’s direct gaze outward: she does not simply appear before the viewer, but actively engages and unsettles them. The result is a participatory kind of looking, in which the work draws the viewer in and makes them part of its psychological tension.

Anna Ayelet Eppel, whose works appear among the sale’s higher-priced offerings, brings a very different world into the auction. Her imagery is whimsical, mythological, and almost biblical — a contemporary Garden of Eden filled with plants, figures, symbols, and strange narrative cues. Works such as Smart People Glow in the Dark and Cutting Back on Plantings suggest a modern answer to Botticelli’s Primavera: lush and decorative, but also unstable, ironic, and faintly surreal. If Botticelli’s spring is ordered by Renaissance grace, Eppel’s garden feels more contemporary — beautiful, intelligent, artificial, and a little dangerous.

Uta Patinkin’s four high-bracket works offer another counterpoint. Her scenes focus on ordinary human life, especially figures gathered in quiet social rituals. The standout is the card-player image, where the men do not read as generic elderly figures or nostalgic immigrants, but read as old, native-born Israelis — local in posture, manner, and atmosphere. The “joker” among them gives the scene a theatrical charge, turning an everyday game into a study of character, humor, and social belonging. Connected to her broader Card Players body of work previously shown at Maya Gallery, the painting shows how a familiar activity can become psychologically alert and compositionally staged.

These works are different in subject, price, and mood, but they show why the sale is worth reviewing rather than simply promoting. The best pieces do not merely fill a category. They create encounters.

Price, value, and participation

In a benefit sale, price carries more than one meaning. It reflects the artist’s reputation, medium, scale, and market position, but it also reflects the buyer’s willingness to support a nonprofit cultural space. The lower price brackets allow new collectors to participate. The middle brackets test confidence in contemporary artists and smaller bodies of work. The upper brackets bring in art-historical prestige and serious patronage.

Maya Gallery emphasized that every purchase directly sustains the gallery’s year-round program and is shared equally with the participating artists. That detail matters. The sale is not simply using artists to raise funds for an institution; it presents itself as a shared model of support.

“Supporting Maya Gallery — and independent art spaces more broadly — means supporting the conditions that allow art to exist in the first place,” Neta Nachtomy and Nir Namir wrote. “As a non-profit, every purchase made through the online sale directly sustains the gallery’s year-round physical program and is shared equally with the participating artists.”

Their final point is the article’s most serious one: support for independent art is not only financial. It is a statement that independent culture matters, that artistic voices should remain diverse and uncompromised, and that there is value in spaces that operate through vision rather than market logic alone.

That may sound idealistic, but in the context of Israeli culture, it is also practical. Nonprofit art spaces do not survive on admiration. They need patrons, artists, volunteers, collectors, viewers, and writers. They need people willing to see cultural life as infrastructure, not decoration.

Maya Gallery’s benefit sale is not pristine, and it should not be. Its interest lies precisely in its mixture: modest works, serious paintings, photographs, drawings, sculptures, still lifes, nudes, landscapes, mythological gardens, conceptual pieces, established names, emerging voices, and uneven surprises. It is not a perfect exhibition. It is a living ecosystem under pressure.

As a review, the sale asks for two kinds of looking. One is the collector’s eye: Which works are strong? Which prices feel justified? Which artists are worth following? The other is the civic eye: What kind of cultural field do we want to survive?

In that sense, Maya Gallery’s annual benefit sale is not only about acquiring art. It is about sustaining the fragile ecology that allows art to keep being made, shown, discussed, and shared.

Maya Gallery’s sixth annual online benefit sale is open for five days. The sale can be viewed through Maya Gallery’s website: https://www.mayagallerytlv.com/art-sale

(This article is not intended as a comprehensive review of every work in the sale, but as a critical look at the auction’s range, structure, and selected visual currents.)

Bonnie K. Goodman, BA, MLIS, is a historian, journalist, librarian, educator, and artist. She holds a Diploma of Collegial Studies in Communications: Art, Media, and Theatre (specializing in Fine Arts and Jewish Studies) from Vanier College, a B.A. in History and Art History and an MLIS from McGill University, with graduate study in Judaic Studies at Concordia University and Jewish Education at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Melton Centre. She has recently pursued advanced training in drawing, painting, and sculpture at Bezalel Academy of Arts and was a 2025 participant in the Studio of Her Own professional development program for artists in Israel.

She contributed to the landmark reference work History of American Presidential Elections, 1789–2008 (2011), edited by Gil Troy, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., and Fred L. Israel and authored most recently, My Jerusalem Life, Interrupted: A Diary of a Teacher in Israel: Aliyah, Art, and the Year Everything Cracked (2026) On This Day in History…: Significant Events in the American Year (2024) and her MA thesis, Unconditional Loyalty to the Cause: Jews, Whiteness, and Anti-Semitism in the Civil War South, 1840–1913 (2026). A former Features Editor at the History News Network, where she launched influential series such as Top Young Historians and History Doyens, Goodman has also worked as a political reporter at Examiner.com, covering U.S. politics, universities, religion, and culture.

Her academic and journalistic writing bridges historical scholarship and public engagement, focusing on American political history, Jewish identity, and the intersection of education and culture. Goodman writes and teaches on topics that explore the relationship between history, collective memory, and cultural expression. Her recent research and essays have appeared in The Jerusalem Report, The Times of Israel, and History News Network. Through both her historical writing and visual art, Goodman seeks to illuminate the continuities between the Jewish past and present and to highlight how memory and creativity shape national and spiritual identity.

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