Menachem Begin’s grandson pushes forward with art in solo show, during country’s painful ‘limbo’

Avinadav Begin, the grandson of late prime minister Menachem Begin and the son of former politician Benny Begin, is an artist who welds iron and steel, pouring cement and then pigments, the powdery substance that provides color to paint, creating intense, hefty fields of color.

More than 40 of his works are currently on display through September 29 at Tel Aviv’s Sheetrit & Wolf Contemporary Art Gallery in “Avinadav Begin: Works.”

It is Begin’s largest solo exhibit to date, with 44 works that he created in recent years. The show has been in development for well over a year and took a while to happen, said Begin, given the difficulties that have accompanied the ongoing war, hostage situation, Iranian attacks, and general trauma in Israeli society.

“We’re still in limbo,” said Begin, speaking in his workshop, a cinderblock space in Even Sapir, a moshav on the outskirts of Jerusalem. “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.”

While Begin, 51, spends a lot of time thinking about the state of the country and what he believes is the immense, gaping distance between the Likud party of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and that of his grandfather, the party’s founder, though he prefers to stay away from politics.

That said, for Begin, it’s been nearly impossible to avoid in the last three years, since Netanyahu’s government was voted into office and Justice Minister Yariv Levin launched his controversial judicial overhaul program.

During the first months of massive protests against the judicial overhaul, Begin joined his father, Benny Begin, at those rallies. He now regularly attends the weekly rallies in Jerusalem for the hostages.

However, the Bezalel-trained artist, who returned to the art world about six years ago after a twenty-year hiatus, prefers to speak about his art.

“I’m not a politician, I’m an artist,” said Begin, who bears a strong resemblance to his father and grandfather.

He’s an artist who doesn’t work with oils and canvas, media that never appealed to him, even as a young student at Jerusalem’s Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design.

Begin’s works are massive frames of metal and steel, welded together with bits of metal netting, punctuated with cement and pigment. He first welds the sheets of metal and then often deconstructs and reassembles them, later pouring concrete and then pigment that saturates the gray cement, often with metal netting, or jutting rods of steel, or small piles of dry cement, creating dense fields of color.

His curators at Sheetrit and Wolf described it as art that is at the intersection of sculpture, painting, print and fresco.

The artworks are created in his Even Sapir workshop, a simple space of cinderblock and a tin roof, filled with a welder’s tools, and hung with a few of the pieces that weren’t brought to the Sheetrit and Wolf show.

Begin doesn’t name his works, but one of them is familiar from previous shows, a white cement wall with a central hole surrounded by a spreading blob of rust.

“I like openings, apertures, they’re portals,” said Begin.

Indeed, Begin is inspired by walls, by the wear and tear of ancient stone and crumbling cement. He visited Italy this summer for the first time, and was touched by the Roman frescoes and the crumbling, rusted piles of the Venetian canals.

As a lifelong Jerusalemite, he is still moved by the massive walls of the Old City, by the aging process of the ancient stones, and by all the civilization that it represents.

Looking at walls, observing their age and their weathering and erosion is a “renewing kind of experience,” said Begin.

Putting together the “Works” exhibit is also a renewal of sorts for Begin, who hadn’t seen all of his works together in many years, not having room on the walls of his studio to hang all of them.

Some are massive, weighing more than 100 kilos (220 pounds), while others are more standard-size, weighing about ten kilos (22 pounds), far heavier than the usual canvases but more manageable for the average home.

“It does feel good to clean up, to see the evolution of the works,” said Begin. “I see what’s stronger, what’s weaker.”

Begin created several works in the immediate aftermath of Hamas’s onslaught of October 7, 2023 — long, rectangular curving lengths of iron and cement saturated with black pigment, the metal curved to echo the Hamas tunnels of Gaza.

Some of them were included in the Sheetrit and Wolf show.

“They were in my head all the time,” said Begin.

A fundraising event at the opening of the exhibit on September 11 raised money for Assure for Children, a non-profit supporting orphans who lost both parents on October 7.

When the Tel Aviv show closes, Begin will prepare for two more shows later this year, in Florida and Mexico, both of them far smaller, with no more than a dozen pieces.

“That’s easier,” he said. “I’ll have a better sense of what I want to show, and it’s always easier to show my art away from home.”