Dunietz’s work evokes the legacy of Joseph Beuys (and the long shadow he cast over Israeli art, from Danziger to Gintun), with its engagement with religiosity, mysticism, and a conflicted relationship with nature (the third image in the carousel: Joseph Beuys, The End of the Twentieth Century, 1983–85).

Another work resembles a musical instrument whose strings have been pulled out of the resonating body and tied directly to the keys, which have become a kind of notational markers delineating space and distance on the wall. The keys/markers hang around a raised corner of the studio, while the strings, almost invisible, stretch to the opposite side. Sculpture is reduced here to something thin and elusive, a perfect inversion of Shemi’s works, whose weight and volume assert a clear aspiration toward power.

This opposition, perhaps too simple, reappears in relation to Dror Hibsh’s Empty Mass, made of semi-transparent polyethylene forms and masking tape. The work speaks entirely of vulnerability, as if a careless touch might release the air, collapse the form, and leave behind flattened, banal plastic. The beautiful work has been shown in several of Hibsh’s exhibitions over the past two years and has become closely identified with him. Here, however, there is a sense that its versatility—there is hardly a space it would not suit—remains at that general level. One can elaborate at length on lightness versus weight, but this remains a broadly applicable opposition.

A photograph of a single Empty Mass unit, a small work hung on a wall in a transitional space, is far more successful. The nylon bodies, like ghosts in a black field, acquire meaning and a sense of cold absent from the fragile forms piled along the wall and in the gap between wall and ceiling.

Sun Franko expanded a segment of the impressive graduate project he presented in the summer of 2025 and establishes a genuine dialogue with the atelier. The point of departure is a small photograph of a hazardous materials emergency shower (one cannot avoid horrific historical associations), taped to the wall as if placed there as a reminder or the beginning of a mood board, right next to Man in the Arava, a heroic stone sculpture by Shami from the 1950s. The contrast is striking: the heroic figure versus the somewhat ridiculous contrapposto figure in the photograph.

The yellow showerhead in the photograph, with its funnel-like shape, reappears as a small white cast above a wooden shelving box, again on two transparencies in Shemi’s painting studio, and as a large formica-covered sculpture (?) standing outside the atelier in the sculpture garden, as if it were still a work in progress. In an amused, seemingly hesitant manner, Franco addresses the danger, the dark side of an engagement with form. He creates an indirect, though seemingly not innocent, reference to the Shrine of the Book in Jerusalem, introducing a destabilizing note into the solid rock of an atelier belonging to a highly acclaimed artist and heroic figure, many of whose major works are monuments.