Street Art Flourishes on Tel Aviv Walls

A serious, bespectacled fellow has been wandering around the streets of Tel Aviv for a decade already, observing the walls, roofs, abandoned buildings and alleyways of the city. But unlike the flocks of contractors and real estate brokers who have been circulating the city streets in recent years looking for their next real estate project, this man is not equipped with a mobile phone or a list of addresses of houses to sell, restore, renovate or destroy. Instead, he is equipped with spray paint and a brush.

Real estate agents and our fellow called Klone share an interest in real estate. While real estate agents want to buy and sell in an era when the prices of apartments in Tel Aviv have skyrocketed, Klone does the opposite: the drawings he paints on buildings are not for sale, and they may be erased by municipal workers or buried under bulldozers carrying out demolition work. In fact, Klone’s art — like that of all street artists — is almost a spiritual enterprise.

Klone, 30, is one of Israel’s pioneers in street art. While this field flourished abroad back in the 1980s, it only began to receive attention from the local art establishment in recent years. Klone’s story is also an immigration tale that produced intimate familiarity with Tel Aviv and a love-hate relationship between the two.

“I immigrated to Israel at the end of 1994 from Kharkov, Ukraine,” he said in a conversation with Al-Monitor in his studio in south Tel Aviv. He continued, “I came to Ramat Gan and studied in a class without other Russian speakers, so I picked up Hebrew very quickly. I didn’t feel the immigration as a trauma, but when you are uprooted from what is familiar and become a minority in every possible fashion, then painting in the street is to paint a familiar space of your very own. A home is the place where you know where you put your things. When I painted on the streets, I felt as if I was putting down my things and remembering where they are.”