The Janco Dada Museum in Ein Hod is offering roughly 70 artworks by various artists – among them Avraham Eilat, Assi Meshullam, and Oren Fischer – in a public auction to be held on November 30 in Tel Aviv.
The museum, founded by friends of the Jewish-Romanian Dada artist Marcel Janco 41 years ago, is facing a sharp drop in revenues due to the ongoing Hezbollah shelling of the North.
The number of visitors to its exhibitions had virtually plummeted to near-nothing and, like other cultural institutions in northern Israel, a cloud of uncertainty obscures its future unless funds can be secured.
Attitudes towards Israeli societal issues
The three artists mentioned display very different attitudes to the core issues of Israeli life.
Eilat, who was born during the British Mandate period, belongs to the idealistic period. The late painter Moshe Kagan, who fused his love of painting with his love of the land by working as a sheep herder at Kibbutz Shamir, was among his mentors.
Meshullam, who has a deep fascination with the mythic aspects of the Near East, offers fantastical, creative insights into the beating heart of this often harsh land and the pressures it operates under.
Fischer, the youngest artist mentioned, is a bold and outspoken critic of the current administration.
In his social media channels, he often shares brutal drawings of human figures bombarded and sacrificed at the whims of forces much larger than themselves.
The auction will be held at the Neve Tzedek Gallery, 14 Beer Yaakov St., Tel Aviv. Saturday, November 30. Hours 11 a.m. to 2 p.m.