Yael Hovav’s paintings explore the spaces where vulnerability, power, and the surreal quietly collide. At the heart of her work is a fixation on the tension between human isolation and connection, often expressed through quiet, domestic settings that feel charged with psychological weight. Her figures, sometimes caught in moments of repose and sometimes subjected to ambiguous interactions, seem to exist in a world that’s both hyperreal and dreamlike.
Hovav uses subtle surrealism—whether it’s hiking boots on a naked figure or the ghostly transparency of a body mid-conversation—to disrupt the ordinary and reveal the latent emotional dissonances in everyday life. Her muted yet arresting palette often bathes these figures in monochromatic light, creating an atmosphere where the colors themselves seem to embody the characters' inner worlds.
In I Dream I’m Falling (2024,) Hovav captures a figure curled up in bed, naked except for hiking boots. The lime-green hues that flood the canvas infuse the sleeping body with an almost spectral quality, as though the subject is caught between waking and dream states. The casual position of the body — fetal, vulnerable, yet content — contrasts with the absurdity of the shoes, an object of movement interrupting the stillness of sleep. Hovav uses this contrast to hint at the lingering tension between rest and action, between domestic calm and the inevitability of the outside world, pressing in. The luminous green saturation heightens the unreality of the scene, making the figure seem suspended in time, frozen in the liminal space of a half-formed thought.
In Here & Here (2022,) Hovav depicts a doctor-like figure leaning forward with a stethoscope, placing it against the chest of a nude woman. The figures are faceless, their identities obscured, as though they haven’t fully materialized—except for their feet, which are rendered in full detail, hinting at an incompleteness, as if they’re still growing into their forms. The cool, monochromatic blues saturate the room, emphasizing an emotional distance and a clinical detachment. The interaction—seemingly intimate—feels more like an examination than a connection. The warm orange glow from the blinds outside sharply contrasts with the cold interior, mocking the sterility of the scene. Hovav’s faceless, nearly translucent figures evoke a sense of dissociation, where the body is present, but the emotional core remains distant, obscured, leaving the space between the two figures thick with unspoken tension and disquiet.
In the charged, unsettling painting titled How Many Kids (2023,) Hovav presents a scene of raw tension and ambiguous power. A faceless man stretches a bow, its arrow made of fragile oats, while a woman kneels before him, her body tense and coiled like a wound spring, as if bracing for an inevitable impact. The back of the woman, illuminated by sharp white lines, carries the weight of "potential children" — a metaphorical burden already imposed on her, even before the arrow is released. The rich, suffocating blue that envelops the scene only intensifies the emotional strain, as though the figures are trapped in a space thick with unspoken expectations. The man’s facelessness, coupled with the fragility of the oat arrow, makes the dynamic between them feel precarious and uneasy, hinting at the power imbalance but leaving the outcome uncertain.
Hovav’s themes of control, vulnerability, and detachment are woven into her paintings, but always with an unsettling ambiguity. In her world, relationships are fraught with untold dynamics, and the quiet corners of domesticity are not sanctuaries but spaces of unresolved tension and emotional contradiction.
Yael Hovav (b. 1993, Jerusalem) lives and works in Tel Aviv. She studied at the Glasgow School of Art, Glasgow, Scotland, and she holds a BFA from the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem, Israel. Hovav’s work was previously exhibited at Be'eri Gallery, Tel Aviv; Alma Home for Hebrew Culture, Tel Aviv; Hanina Gallery, Tel-Aviv; Rosenfeld Gallery, Tel Aviv; The Jerusalem Biennale; Binyamin Gallery, Tel Aviv; and Hamifall Gallery, Jerusalem. This is her first exhibition with Thierry Goldberg Gallery.