Yoav Ben Dov

Yoav Ben-Dov was born into a family of artists in Ein Hod in 1967, and his childhood was influenced by well-known artists in the village such as Marcel Janco, Avraham Bazaq and Uri Lifschitz. At the age of 8, he watched the work of Marcel Janco and Michael Gross, and cleaned brushes for Avraham Bazaq. Ben Dov sold his first work at the age of 17 to the conductor of the Berlin Opera. Ben Dov adopted his love of the hammer and chisel from Tuvia Juster and spent two years working with Uri Lifschitz. After his military service and studying in Israel and abroad, he opened his own studio in Jaffa that served as a source of pilgrimage for artists from Israel and around the world. Today he lives and works in the south of Tel Aviv.

Ben Dov has exhibited in dozens of solo and group exhibitions in Israel and abroad and participated in important projects such as the Hiriya project at the Tel Aviv Museum, Artis New York and the Penguins Installation.
In 2008, Ben Dov embarked on a large-scale project around the country, “Tefilat HaDerech” (Prayer of the Road) in which he coated his car with gold leaf, and embarked on a journey around the country when a golden Aramaic prayer was playing which was created with Yochai Kai Ben Dov and Berry Sakharof. He was also the winner of the Zionist Artist Award for 2013.
Ben Dov has designed and supervised many projects in Israel and around the world, including designing an applied art sculpture in public space called E-Tree, which is a resting place that uses renewable and solar energy for visitors.

Ben Dov’s exhibitions show a search for an ideal concept, which makes up cultural and individual symbols. His exhibitions are a showcase that appeals to all the senses. For example, in the Olive Exhibition (2003), Ben Dov covered the floor of the gallery space with seven tones of olive residue (the remainder of the oil press) and invited visitors to experience the “oil press” and its scents in Tel Aviv. The article in the exhibition Wheat (1999) was written by chef Erez Komorowski and the catalog itself was made of wheat chaff. As part of the Rimon (1999) exhibition, Ben Dov invited two chefs Mahmoud Habashi and Yehuda Broitman to a special evening of flavors in which they prepared dishes based on pomegranate. In the exhibition Shepard (2007) Ben Dov focused on vision and illusion and created a darkroom that imagined the outside and allowed observation of the moon and stars.

His works capture in their content a complex of personal and universal feelings of home and homeliness, but at the same time they are also charged with the inevitable reference of the home and its absence, against the background of the Israeli reality.