Late August, and the Tel Aviv heat is at its peak. Yet right now the city holds three exhibitions with a rare kind of quiet. All three, each in its own way, are about absence: pools without people, a landscape emptied of noise, and a studio left without its artist. Here are three shows I think are worth visiting before the summer ends:

Melanie Siegel, "Every Look Was a New Window"

Melanie Siegel's swimming pools hang on the walls of Braverman Gallery and offer whoever walks in a brief respite from the scorching July and August heat of the city. But despite their cool, refreshing look, something in them refuses to sit easy. They are quiet, clean, and precise, and for exactly that reason also a little unsettling. There is no one in them. The water is still, the light a grayish blue, and the spaces around them empty and polished, as if painted a moment before someone is about to step in, or a moment after everyone has already left.

Siegel's landscapes sit somewhere between reality and imagination. Her starting point is real places, but over the course of the work they shift until they become invented, idealized scenes. The pools and their designed surroundings look almost like architectural models: precise, orderly, and detached from everyday life. There is something surreal about them: they look entirely possible, and yet they seem not to belong to any real world.

The longer you linger in front of the paintings, the clearer it becomes that these pools are not only a place but also a state of mind. The reflections in the water, the play of light and shadow, and the clean geometric lines create an appearance of calm and harmony, beneath which a vague sense of unease is stirring. The works move along the border between utopia and dystopia: between the longing for nature, quiet, and vacation, and the human attempt to control the environment and shape it.

📍 Braverman Gallery, 33 Eilat St, Tel Aviv
📅 Through September 17

From the empty pools to a whole world of dream, at one of my favorite galleries in the city, Nassima Landau (Suzanne Landau is one of the most influential women in the Israeli art world. She was chief curator at the Israel Museum and director and chief curator at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, and also a co founder of the foundation).

The exhibition "Finding Neverland" draws its inspiration from J.M. Barrie's "Peter Pan," and offers a moment of immersion in a utopian universe where dreaming, refuge, and renewal become possible again. The landscapes here are emptied of noise, time stands still, and something long forgotten surfaces once more.

Among the works you can meet the golden, shimmering water lilies of Nir Hod, an Israeli artist based in New York, alongside the invented, lush forests of the Belgian painter Ben Sledsens. Two very different routes to the same escape: one polished and refined, the other wild and colorful, and both invite you inside.

📍 Nassima Landau, 55 Ahad Ha'am St, Tel Aviv
📅 Through September 24

"Guarantee of Sanity" (תרגלתי סטודיו), Dana Darvish and Rami Maymon

Dana Darvish (born 1975, died 2025) was an Israeli artist and photographer who worked for more than two decades in photography based practices. Almost all the photographs she worked with are taken from catalogues, posters, postcards, and publications. From them she created a collage like chain: a work, a photograph of a work, a photograph that meets another photograph or a text, and finally a photomontage that multiplies its meaning. In this way she offered further ways to look at the meeting between a work and the gallery, the paper, and consciousness.

Over the years she kept a deep artistic dialogue and a close friendship with the artist and photographer Rami Maymon. Before her death she asked him and the curator Ilanit Konopny to manage her art estate. The exhibition grew out of the process in which Maymon organized her studio, and it slowly became something else: a shared studio, an archive in formation, a place where her works and his keep talking to each other. This is not a farewell. It is a room where an artist's practice still goes on, even without her.

📍 Maya Gallery, Shvil Hameretz 2, Kiryat HaMelacha, Tel Aviv
📅 Through September 12