Dov Heller

Dov Heller (1937–2018) was a multidisciplinary artist, laborer, and farmer, who lived and worked on Kibbutz Nirim in the Western Negev.
Ranging from painting and sculpture to installation and printmaking, his work was characterized by social and political awareness. Heller was one of the founders of HaMeshutaf Kibbutz, a group of kibbutzim artists established in the wake of the 1977 right-wing rise to power in Israel (known as “the upheaval”). The group members challenged the political and social processes in Israel as well as the ideological crisis of the kibbutz movement and the erosion of its values.

As an artist, Heller combined the biographical and ideological with art. Every May 1st he raised the red flag and held an exhibition with guest artists at the engraving workshop institute, which he founded in the former milking institute building on Kibbutz Nirim dairy farm. In these exhibitions, he served a “workers’ menu,” with Borscht, bread, pickled herring, and red wine. The event ended with the singing of “The Internationale.”

The works in the exhibition unfold Heller’s various practices and reflect his commitment to peace, his socialist worldview, the desire to face the trauma of the war on both sides of the border, and the preoccupation with the biographical and the personal. Among other things, the exhibition features a series of drawings from his ongoing exploration of Loess, conflating art, agriculture and geopolitics. It also presents an etching from his series Tel Gama, where he joined the political with the personal, combining autobiographical images with the story of two Palestinian women – Majedah Abu Hajaj and her mother, Rayah Salma Hajaj – who were killed during Operation Cast Lead in Gaza.

The works in the exhibition are from the Heller estate, which is kept in Kibbutz Nirim. The show is part of a series of exhibitions that feature works that survived the October 7th attacks. In a sense, these exhibitions continue the underlying logic of the Mishkan’s rich collection in its nascence, guided among other things by the need to salvage Jewish culture that faced the threat of annihilation during World War II and to preserve the works of Jewish artists from communities that no longer exist.