Zohar Tal Inbar | Kibbutz Basilica

Zohar Tal Inbar “Kibbutz Basilica”

Opening Event: Thursday, January 8, 2026, 20:00

Zemack Contemporary Art is pleased to invite you to the opening of ‘Kibbutz Basilica’, a solo exhibition by artist Zohar Tal Inbar – a monumental painted panorama that intertwines family memory with a public narrative, bringing together the kibbutz visual idiom and sources from the Western classical tradition. At its heart is a monumental panorama composed of seventeen panels (17 meters), which join to form an immersive visual environment that draws viewers into a journey of vivid images unfolding as a story.

In Kibbutz Basilica, stylistic gestures that unite simplicity with visual richness create a meeting point between Christian symbolism and the social realism that prevailed in kibbutz art. Entering this movement at full force is the “kibbutz mother tongue”—two artists Tal Inbar calls “the basilica painters of my childhood”: Avraham Amarant-Tushak (Kibbutz Mizra) and Avraham Omri (Kibbutz Sha’ar HaAmakim). For Tal Inbar, this is an intensely personal memory: Tushak would decorate the windows of Mizra’s old dining hall for every holiday; his stained-glass-like paintings depicted scenes of daily life and events tied to the festivals and the seasons. On the walls of her childhood dining hall appeared idealized images – sturdy men and tall women celebrating together their modest new home through manual labor and festive ceremonies. This is the mother tongue of an artist raised in Kibbutz Mizra.

Yet within this familiar language, Tal Inbar chooses to “return” to the wall what never found its way onto it, “the other story” of her childhood. It is the story of her father, Ben Tal, who arrived at Kibbutz Mizra from Germany in 1962 at the age of 22: a Christian German soldier who chose to desert, flee his country, and ask to join the Jewish people. His arrival in the kibbutz space was charged: on the one hand, an intense attraction to the possibility of belonging to the enchanting world revealed before him; on the other, suspicion, resistance, and heated assemblies around the presence of a “stranger” at the heart of a community where Europe’s scars were still throbbing. Within this tension he met Hagar, a kibbutz-born woman, and the two chose each other despite objections. They left together for another kibbutz for a time, and later returned to Mizra once things had calmed. Ben’s conversion process, which began shortly after his arrival, was long and complex and was completed only later; and in parallel, the Christian dimension did not vanish entirely from the family sphere—among other things through her Christian grandmother, Margarete, and visits to the Church of the Annunciation in Nazareth, a place that was sacred and significant to her. Tal Inbar’s painting gathers these layers of story into images – not as historical explanation, but as an emotional-visual history in which symbols and memories, belonging and estrangement, mix into a single language.

From this perspective, kibbutz life appears in her paintings through the eyes of a “foreign immigrant”—someone whose place in society is not assured, who is required to shed one identity in order to receive a new one; and at the same time, the beauty of the place – its landscape and its distinctive people – casts a spell over him and envelops him in joy.

The project began in 2022 at the gallery of Kibbutz Sha’ar HaAmakim (Curator: Einat Sinai Pasternak). In 2023 it was presented at the Mishkan Museum of Art, Ein Harod, at the invitation of Yaniv Shapira (then Chief Curator of the Mishkan), and received wide acclaim. Since then, the exhibition has continued to Kibbutz Sha’ar HaGolan, Kibbutz Hatzor, and now Kibbutz Basilica arrives at Zemack Contemporary Art in Tel Aviv, where it will be on view from January 8, 2026.