Avinadav Begin, the grandson of former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, is an artist, and he’s having his show right now in Tel Aviv at Sheetrit & Wolf Contemporary Art Gallery.
At that gallery, he is currently showing his latest creations, works that are neither paintings nor sculptures but something in between. They are made from metal and steel, and are abstract, variously resembling rubble and broken window frames.
He called them “openings, apertures” in an interview with the Times of Israel this week. They are reportedly heavy works, weighing up to 220 pounds.
He emphasized that he is an artist and therefore neither like his father, the politician Benny Begin, nor his grandfather, who cofounded the right-wing Likud party, which is now chaired by current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
According to the Times of Israel, Avinadav feels a “gaping distance” between the Likud party of Menachem’s day and the ruling Likud party of the present, whose leaders have been sharply critiqued by many foreign nations, as well as several international bodies, for the ongoing military campaign in Gaza nearly two years after the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023. The position reflects that of his father, who earlier this year warned that Netanyahu’s government wanted to institute “a new and dangerous regime, whose name is not yet known, but will not be democracy.”
“I’m not a politician, I’m an artist,” Avinadav told the Times of Israel.
Still, he did address an array of political issues. He described facing a “limbo” state following what the article described as “the ongoing war, hostage situation, Iranian attacks, and general trauma in Israeli society.”
“The hostages’ families are in a limbo of hell, while the rest of us are in a limbo somewhere between the Garden of Eden and hell,” Begin said. He reportedly attends weekly protests calling for the return of the remaining 48 hostages taken by Hamas during its October 7 attack, which killed around 1,200 people. (The article did not mention that more than 65,000 people have died in Gaza since October 7, according to the local health ministry.)
The Times of Israel drew a comparison between Begin’s usage of metal and cement and the “Hamas tunnels of Gaza.” Did the hostages influence the works created after October 7? Begin had this to say: “They were in my head all the time.”
