Gaia Yoel (b. Israel, 1999) is a contemporary realist painter, based in Ramat Gan and working in Tel Aviv.
She is a graduate of the Painting and Drawing Program at The Florence Academy of Art, completing her studies in 2022.

Yoel has participated in numerous group exhibitions in Israel and across Europe, including “Fruits of Summer” at the Florence Academy Gallery in Italy (2021, 2022); “Between the Living Room Walls”; the “21 Project” at the Fresh Paint Art Fair (2024); and exhibitions at the Artists’ House on Herzl Street, Tel Aviv (2023).

She held a solo exhibition, “Soft Borders,” at Beit HaOmanim Gallery; and participated in “Mirror, Paper, Mirror” at the Florence Academy of Art Gallery, Italy (2025). She was selected as a finalist in HaMashabavot (2025), for the FiKVA 2025 group exhibition in Barcelona, Spain, and as a finalist in the international Figurativas 2025 competition of MEAM – the European Museum of Modern Art.

Yoel’s work emerges from a deep engagement with classical traditions alongside a personal, emotional response to contemporary life. Drawing inspiration from 19th-century academic painting and the expressive power of minute details, she explores the tension between beauty and sorrow, fragility and resilience. Through a blend of observation and imagination, she creates paintings that seek to reveal emotional truths through physical form.

Whether depicting still life, figures, or symbolic compositions, Yoel employs traditional techniques and painterly brushwork to investigate texture, light, and material. Objects such as dried flowers, glass vessels, and fabrics become bearers of meaning, of memory, transition, inspiration, and hope. Young female figures often appear as reflections of the artist’s own inner world: wanderers, muses, gazing figures, or characters holding onto fleeting moments of beauty.

Her recent works engage with the studio space while extending outward toward universal questions of identity, purpose, and belonging. Yoel is interested in the possibility that art can hold clarity and ambiguity simultaneously and that within the shadows, a quiet and enduring beauty may reside, one that insists on being seen.