From May 21-26, the 16th Freshpaint Art & Design Fair opened its doors to art-loving visitors. This important platform has supported the local creative community for years and has become the largest and one of the most influential annual art events in Israel.
Since its inception, the fair has been organized in cooperation with the Tel Aviv-Jaffa Municipality, which has promoted various locations in the city. This year, the fair gave a new life to the Kremnitzky Technical Center, the former Israel Electric Corporation building in Tel Aviv, east of the Ayalon Highway. Spread throughout a spacious hangar and the surrounding outdoor areas, the fair was full of gems waiting to be discovered.
Like every year, visitors could see artwork presented by leading galleries alongside projects created especially for the fair by artists, curators, and various art institutions.
The Artists Greenhouse section highlights new, independent artists. The selection for this feature is anonymous and takes over half a year. “Artists who want to participate in Greenhouse send their portfolios without names. It doesn’t matter their age or whether they had any formal art education,” said Manor Gera, CEO of the fair.
From among the many works, 48 new artists were selected by the curators this year. Their names were revealed right before the fair. For this column, I have selected three of the 48 whose works particularly caught my attention. The three artists, born in the 1970s, ‘80s, and ‘90s, respectively, answered my three questions:
What inspires you?
What do you call art?
What, in your opinion, makes your artwork different from that of other artists?
Shirley Moneyhon
Painter and ceramist Shirley Moneyhon was born in Eilat in 1986. After serving in the IDF, she moved to Tel Aviv.
She has always loved drawing. She studied painting privately since seventh grade, then at Hatahana Studio and in various ateliers. She graduated from the Department of Visual Communication at Shenkar in 2014. “I recently went back to school after having two children, and I’m doing my master’s in art there,” she told the Magazine.
She worked as a graphic designer for years but eventually abandoned the computer and returned to the canvas (and later, added ceramics). “I realized that art was an inseparable part of me,” she said.
Her work encompasses Jewish traditions (her family became religious when she was in her teens) and the family unit. In her work, Moneyhon avoids planning and iterative sketching, preferring to let shapes and colors explore directly on the surface until everything comes together.
At Freshpaint 2025, she presented The Praying Vessels, a collection of hand-crafted ceramic vessels to simulate a mass prayer.
“For the past year and a half, I have been praying for things to improve here and for the vessels to become containers for good intentions, hope, and a look into the future,” she said. Around them, she has created illustrated ceramic objects and oil paintings on canvas.
Inspiration: “I’m deeply curious about how ordinary objects or simple body gestures can take on ritualistic or even sacred meanings. I’m fascinated by the transformation of the everyday into something emotionally significant. Much of my inspiration comes from the people around me – my family, friends, and daily life. I especially love painting my family members; they’re a constant source of tenderness, complexity, and truth. There’s something profoundly moving about capturing familiar moments that suddenly feel timeless or symbolic.”
Meaning of art: “For me, art begins where life reveals itself in unexpected ways. It’s not limited to what hangs in a gallery or what’s officially labeled as ‘art’; it’s about the feeling an object or image can stir in you.
“Something becomes art when it carries a presence, when you can sense life within it. That might mean a visual connection or an emotional response – sometimes subtle, sometimes overwhelming. It could be excitement, joy, sadness, confusion, or even discomfort. What matters is that moment of recognition when something external suddenly resonates with your inner world.
“That connection doesn’t have to be polished or intentional. A child’s drawing – like one my four-year-old son brings home – can move me just as deeply as a museum piece. There’s a kind of raw, unfiltered honesty in things that weren’t necessarily created with ‘art’ in mind, and I find that incredibly powerful.
“To me, art is not about status or perfection. It’s about energy, emotion, and the invisible threads that tie a piece to the human experience. Sometimes it’s in the craft or the concept, but often it’s in the unexpected spark – a gesture, color, texture, or memory it unlocks. Art lives in that moment when the everyday transforms, even briefly, into something meaningful. And that can happen anywhere.”
Moneyhon’s art: “What sets my work apart is perhaps the way I blend materials and traditions. I love integrating ceramics into my practice – sometimes sculpting objects, other times painting directly onto ceramic surfaces - and combining these with more traditional techniques like oil painting on canvas.
“I enjoy playing with contrasts: the old and the new, the fragile and the permanent, the precious and the overlooked. This tension often becomes a central theme in my work and gives it its unique character.”
www.instagram.com/shirleymoneyhon/
Ehud Raz
Ehud Raz was born in Haifa in 1975. After completing his military service, he studied industrial design at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design (BA, 2001) in Jerusalem and eventually moved to Tel Aviv.
He didn’t work in his profession for long; instead, he pursued journalism (“I reported and edited articles about design and lifestyle”) and other jobs in the following years. “But I always painted [acrylics] at home for as long as I can remember. It was a form of escapism for me,” Raz noted.
He said that for many years, he wasn’t ready to share his art with the public, but seven years ago he organized a “sales exhibition” (“I didn’t want to use a big word like ‘art’ yet”), and he realized that people liked his work.
Over the years, he has developed a very minimalist style, using geometric forms painted on canvas, wood, and acrylic glass. He presented various examples of them at Freshpaint 2025.
In my experience, the simplicity of his work deeply engages the search for perspective.
Raz likes to explore the texture of the material. “I like to touch the materials and also know about them. I have great respect for science,” he said. For example, he works on bare wood, polishes it, and gives it the conditions he wants to achieve, and then he paints on it.
“The process is very linear; I put one shape after another, and then I create a landscape. I turn two dimensions into three, and I never know how it ends.” Asked how he knows when it actually is the end, Raz replied, “At some point, it just clicks, and you know, that’s it.”
Inspiration: “The real question is, what doesn’t inspire me? I’m a very curious person. My eyes examine everything, and I see beauty in almost anything. Inspiration also comes through other senses: touch, smell, and sound. All I need is the tiniest trigger for my mind to run wherever it wants, always toward creation.
“I can see a broken bench, a dried, twisted leaf, or a faded wall painted in a hue that electrifies me.”
Meaning of art: ”It might sound like I’m a rebel, but I’m not. It’s just the way I see things. Art is a tangible or imagined object that leaves you no choice but to feel something. It’s something that kicks you or disrupts your status quo, even if only for a moment, even in a negative way.
“Art is the exception. The unearthly element that always holds more than what the senses can grasp.
“There has to be a layer that touches a deep nerve and stirs up a storm of thoughts and emotions.”
Raz’s art: “My work is relatively abstract and minimalist, and at times I feel like I’m dealing with themes that belong to a different era – a formal, abstract exploration untouched by politics or morality. I suppose it’s a bit naïve… But I didn’t choose this.
“My style is the result of 50 years of creation and growth.
“I have neither the desire nor the chance to change it. My art is different only because I created it; it carries everything I am, and art is a personal, emotional nuance. This is who I am.”
www.instagram.com/ehudraz/
Yule Ildis
Born in 1998 in Tel Aviv, where she lives and works, Yuli Ildis graduated with a BA in art and art education from Beit Berl’s HaMidrasha in 2024. Ildis is a multidisciplinary artist who works with a wide range of artistic media, from very modern digital techniques to more traditional ones, such as pencil and charcoal drawing and oil painting.
As a child, she tried acting in several Israeli films, and her dream was to become an actress. “I went to the School of Arts Arison Campus (high school and middle school), specializing in theater. I wanted to be an actress until I was 18, when I went to Florence, Italy, for the summer.”
A six-week program of Italian language, art history, academic drawing, and oil painting was a life-changing experience, which made her decide to become an artist. “I lived with an Italian family in a rented room; it was very much like a movie,” she said with a big smile.
As an artist, Ildis explores the issues of climate change and elements of natural disasters, and she focuses on the intersection of memory and nostalgia with contemporary reality, as seen in her lightboxes. She uses photos from family albums and places them next to photos from the present that she has photographed and edited, revealing the gap between childhood, nostalgic perceptions, and current reality.
At Freshpaint 2025, she presented oil paintings, lightboxes based on photography, and drawings from a series created from photos she took in the communal shelter of her Tel Aviv apartment building, depicting her neighbors’ pets during the sirens at the beginning of the war.
Ildis is the daughter of media personalities Miki Haimovich and Eli Ildis; but like all the other artists in the Greenhouse section, her portfolio was selected anonymously. She wants to build her own name.
Inspiration: “The greatest source of inspiration is the reality around us: different events in our local environment, traveling, and personal life experiences. Life experiences have inspired me in the past and continue to do so today.”
Meaning of art: “Art shouldn’t be reduced to right or wrong, beautiful or ugly. When I teach art to younger kids now, I always make sure to show them throughout the year as many examples as possible of different artists from all over the world so they have the widest concept of art possible and allow themselves to explore art with less judgment.
“Art exists in everything around us, whether it’s in the almost harmonized way street noises blend into a single sound or in ‘actual’ artwork in the museum. The question is whether we’re willing to see it, give it space and weight, and allow it to grow and touch us.”
Ildis’s art: “Each artist creates from a unique inner world with a distinct technique and different inspirations.
“In my art, I work with a wide range of media and subjects, choosing the medium based on the message I want to convey. For example, when I created the ‘War Dogs’ series of drawings, it emerged from the continuous stays in the shared bomb shelter with my neighbors and their dogs.
“Since Oct. 7, seeing one another in the bomb shelter has become a daily routine. Whether it’s during the day or in the middle of the night, when the sirens start everybody in my building (and sometimes people from buildings around us that don’t have a shelter) runs to the underground bomb shelter until it’s safe to go up again.
“The chaos of the shelter and the temporary bond formed among the neighbors and the dogs inspired me to create something that expresses and captures those moments. It began with photographing the different dogs in the shelter during every alarm and developed into pencil and charcoal drawings. Something in their innocence – the fact that they didn’t choose to be part of this situation – moved me and inspired me to create this series.”
www.instagram.com/yulildis