Downtown: Illustrations at the Golda Parking Garage

Illustration plays a key role in our world, transcending the boundaries of language to communicate ideas, culture, stories, and emotions in a universal and wordless manner. Illustrations captivate our senses and spark our imagination. They tell a visual story that enhances empathy and connection with the characters and their experiences, or with our surroundings.

The Golda Parking Garage is located at a central place, serving key institutions of the city of Tel Aviv-Jaffa. On one side is the Courthouse (which these days is playing a pivotal role in the country’s future), the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, and the extensive Beit Ariella Library. On the other side are the Cameri Theater and the Israeli Opera House. Thousands of people go to and fro between these buildings, in and out, sitting, eating, watching, and experiencing. This exhibition aims to link together the space, the people, and the illustrators who shed light on both.

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Ovadia Benishu / Dog Park
A class reunion takes place every day in the neighborhood garden.

Elad Elyakim / Sculptures in Space
The work draws its inspiration from the sculptures scattered throughout the Museum and surrounding it. The subject and title of the painting are not accidental, as adjoining the wall is the entrance to the Museum’s famous Sculpture Garden. Elyakim chose to paint the sculptures in a new light, by using a contrasting color palette and a composition based on an isometric grid. The choice of red, yellow, black, and white is intended to make the sculptures stand out, allowing each one to get the attention it deserves.

Batia Kolton / Noa
This painting depicts the fantasy world of children’s literature. It is dedicated to Noa Dagan—Kolton’s favorite librarian at the Library for Children and Youth at Beit Ariella Library. Dagan has been working in libraries for 24 years, of which twelve have been spent at Beit Ariella.

David Polonsky / Escalators
The Golda Center is not just a hub of “respectable” arts: the courtyard situated just above the mural wall is a gathering place for skateboarders. The work uses the aesthetics of the skateboarders’ movement to bring the parking garage space to life.

Niv Tishbi / Flower Toss at the Opera
This wall presents a theatrical scene with four characters that link together the worlds of opera and cabaret. The characters, reminiscent of iconic personas such as Pierrot and the Phantom of the Opera, walk toward the stairs, as though about to walk off the stage as flowers are thrown at them at the end of the performance. They are illuminated by the stage spotlights, which divide the colored surfaces into geometric shapes inspired by Cubism and Italian Futurism. These give the scene a sense of dynamism, noise, and kinetic movement.

Amit Trainin / Tel Aviv-Jaffa, City of Freedom and Equality
As befits the current times, Amit Trainin chose to express in his painting the values of freedom and equality—which, in his view, Tel Aviv is founded on.

Anat Warshavsky / Draining
Tall and short, cheap and luxurious, shiny and broken, articulate and inarticulate, sophisticated and simple, temporary and eternal, true and false—all come out of the holes, mixing and colliding with each other. Creating life together. Ultimately, they all drain back into the hole that they came from.