One of the main goals of museums, including art museums, is to collect, document, and conserve valuable artworks for the general public in the present and future. In recent years, the Negev Museum of Art has devoted great efforts to creating temporary exhibitions of artists from Israel and around the world, thus establishing its status and position as a significant museum among Israel’s art museums. Behind the scenes, we continue the process of enlarging and upgrading our collection.

The museum’s collection started taking shape in the 1960s, when it was still part of the Negev Museum, dedicated mainly to archaeology. The collection was first registered in 1987 when the museum received accreditation as a museum by the Ministry of Culture. Most works in its collection are by twentieth-century Israeli artists, and a few by international artists.

Over the past year the collection has grown, thanks to several major donations of works – paintings, drawings, sculpture, and prints by Israeli artists, some of whom were not previously represented in the collection. A significant gift was given by Mordechai Geldman, the well-known poet who is also a creative artist and a practicing psychologist. A former art critic for Haaretz, he curates exhibitions and writes about art. Geldman’s decision to bequeath his entire collection, free of charge, to the Negev Museum of Art, evidences his trust in the museum and the desire to give the public works of art that he received through his personal and professional relationships with various artists. Several paintings have entered the collection from the estate of artist Avigdor Steimatsky through his daughter, Noa Steimatsky, and via other donations.

Displayed in the exhibition are works by pivotal artists in Israeli modernism: Steimatsky and Streichman, the founders and leaders of the New Horizons group, and prominent artists in the next generation of the abstract, Lea Nikel and Moshe Kupferman. In the 1980s, trends that turned their back on the abstract and introduced images and symbols, including some from the world of religion, and representations of death, are evident in works by Igael Tumarkin, Moshe Gershuni, and Bianca Eshel-Gershuni. In the field of art in Israel there are also figurative artists who are not associated with any school or group. Two of them are represented in one painting: Ofer Lellouche painted the artist Jan Rauchwerger while he was painting a portrait of Mordechai Geldman. Compelling combinations between the figurative and the abstract, painting imbued with materiality and sensuality, are found in the work of Pesach Slabosky, a much admired artist and teacher, whose work has not been represented so far in the museum’s collection. The collection now features works by  artists Marik Lechner, Michal Heiman, Galit Rauchwerger, Nomi Bruckmann, and Chava  Samuel. We also note veteran artists Steffa Reis and Rafi Kaiser, who contributed their works to the collection. The museum’s collection is growing and flourishing, and this exhibition is an opportunity to share the good news with the public.