Minerva is the flagship program of Atelier. It is a two-year program providing deep, comprehensive, and professional artistic training in sculpture, painting, and drawing.
The exhibition displays eleven bodies of work across all gallery spaces, created over two years of intensive individual and group practice.


Ahuva Weiss – Body Memories
My engagement with the body has been with me for as long as I can remember. It spans from a professional background as a biologist and dietitian, through a personal struggle with pain and the passage of time, to the constant sensation of a spirit wrapped in the physical.
In my work, I deconstruct body parts and organic shapes to touch what lies beyond, creating a new inner and spiritual order. The organs and visual language, rendered in a rich palette of organic forms and twists, serve as the 'garments of the soul' that seek expression and connection to the sublime.
The creative process involves deconstruction, assembly, and a search for meaning born out of playfulness, joy, and contemplation of the impermanence of life.
These miniature paintings on paper are sized like personal postcards, expressing an inner plea for attention and contemplation before moving on.

Ori Gerstel – Floating Above Consciousness
I perceive the act of painting as a multidimensional experience, akin to observing a body in water. On one hand, you see what is on the surface: floating objects, reflections that form colors, shapes, and even compositions. All of these represent our conscious mind. On the other hand, what lies beneath the surface peek through, reflecting the subconscious. Both carry significant weight on the appearance of the water, which is also the appearance of the painting.

Orly Alexander – Lesbians Have a Skincare Routine Too
The series Lesbians Have a Skincare Routine Too is painted in acrylic on shower curtains that expand and contract, flirting with life preservers as flat, three-dimensional objects. My works deal with the visibility of a sixty-year-old, fat, lesbian woman. I raise questions about how much space the body occupies, how much space it is allowed to occupy, and what a lesbian woman longs for in a society with a flat, uniform emphasis on body culture, pleasure, and beauty.
Alongside these, I lay out childhood memories of my father, Kamal (كمال), who was a worker at the "Tzinometal" pipe factory in Netanya and used to smoke Ascot cigarettes. Placing these works side by side brings forth reflections on East and West, parents, masculinity, femininity, and the permission to exist in between. In the Tzinometal series, the substrate itself consists of layers of acrylic that I prepared myself. The Sisyphean labor and coarseness of these acrylic sheets echo the smell of sweat and oil stains from my father returning from work. They are encased in a rigid Plexiglas "sandwich" alongside horizontal and vertical Plexiglas tubes.
My paintings are figurative yet strive toward abstraction; hung on the wall, yet tempted to detach from it.

Tal Jamshi – Carnival of Masks
I paint my family members wearing masks, rendered on an exaggerated scale with frenetic brushstrokes and patches of color.
My paintings depict a strange space where the familiar and the foreign mix: the domestic and the uncanny, the victim and the perpetrator, the threatened and the threatening. The masks symbolize the concealment of an inner world that no one can ever enter, not even those closest to us. After living with an anxiety disorder, my large canvases make this transparent struggle present, alongside the act of overcoming it in a carnival of masks ruled by confusion, vulnerability, and helplessness. It is a conflict between the need and desire to trust at least one person as an anchor, and a default fear and distrust of all people that slowly crumbles as part of my personal recovery process.

Tal Huber – Hidden, Revealed, Exposed, and Hidden Again
For me, painting is a process of searching within the unknown. The story reveals itself in the making. In my work, I leave room for uncertainty, memory, imagination, and the viewer's gaze. My paintings begin without a prior plan, through a free and intuitive gesture. Out of the layers, a process of revealing and concealing begins. Images and figures emerge from the painting and sometimes merge back into it. This creates an ongoing tension between what is exposed and what remains hidden, between the concrete and an image that stays open and unresolved.
This process echoes how we move through life: built layer upon layer out of experiences, memories, encounters, and moments. Even what has been erased or hidden continues to exist within us, affecting what appears on the surface. Ultimately, the image that remains on the canvas is the result of everything that was created, covered, erased, and discovered along the way.

Tal Shaked – The Visit
Each painting here presents its own small narrative. Sometimes it is clearer to me, and sometimes a bit mysterious. But no matter what, and as far as I can see, it is always the same story: one reality intruding into another to raise the age-old question: what is the meaning of it all?

Michal Mosko – I Noticed
My body of work is an intimate daily log alongside an expressive drive for free imagination. The source of these images is my family. Self-portraiture and relationships serve as a visual and emotional anchor. The starting point for the paintings are fragments of fleeting moments, childhood photos, and images from my phone gallery.
Through a fast, intuitive, and intense process, I create paintings with a raw, painterly character, characterized by bold colors that dialogue with the worlds of comics and street art. My paintings do not aim to pursue the beautiful or classic, but rather to channel the overload of stimuli and thoughts into an emotional, present visual language.

Miriam Drath – Lucid Dream
In the series of paintings I worked on over the past two years, I painted from both the subconscious and from observing external imagery. The paintings were mostly created without planning; new images emerged from within during the process. In my workflow, I stretch a white canvas and, over time, scribble, paint, and add layer upon layer of acrylic paint in a random manner. When I exhaust this stage, I create a paper collage that serves as a reference for the final painting, which I execute in oil colors. During the process, I add images that arise from wandering or dreams. When the dialogue between us ends, the painting is complete.

Karen Leiderman – Memory of a Place
My work exists at the intersection of presence and absence, and between an actual place and the memory of a place. In my paintings, I describe the internal space of a collapsing tent through layers, folds, and shadows. The space becomes quiet, temporary, and fragile—a realm where the boundary between inside and outside blurs.
In doing so, I raise questions about the spaces we construct for ourselves and the sense of security we seek within them.

Roni Hirsch – The Schoolyard
Deep within the grass of the school playground, in the white tiles that can be peeled off the hallway walls—carefully running your fingers over them to feel the shiny part alongside the broken, peeled surface—a sharp memory arises like a bubble that cannot pop. Existing within the space of memory, inside the world on the canvas, the layers of paint slowly build a tangible recollection. In this memory bubble, one can get lost, play, and cover the experience with color, much like the paint applied over the white tiles on the walls. You can no longer see the glossy part, but you can see and feel the tiles exactly as they are beneath the paint meant to cover them.
I paint in oils and choose large canvases that one can drown in, driven by a desire to feel that I am playing and free to make big mistakes—to feel the presence and resistance of a large object in the room beside me. It will fall and sway during the working process, demanding a struggle to cover it with paint. The scale makes the work feel alive.

Tami Margalit – Closeness and Separation
Everyone strives to return home, searching for safety, certainty, and love.
To me, a couple represents a space where love and longing, safety and vulnerability, closeness and separation coexist simultaneously. I linger on the moment where two people almost become one, yet remain two.
Through the body, the gaze, touch, and the distance between them, I pose the question: "What is home?" Is home a place, a person, a sense of belonging, or perhaps the ability to be close without losing one's individuality?
I paint in oil with expressive, free brushstrokes that allow me to move between materiality and blurring, presence and disappearance, letting the space between the figures become part of the story. In my paintings, I observe and explore the tension between the desire for closeness, touch, and merging with the other, and the physical separation in reality.