Joav BarEl

Joav BarEl was born in Tel Aviv, Mandatory Palestine, to Aharon (“Aharonchik”) Elkind and Shlomit Cohen Tzedek.

[2] In his senior year of high school, BarEl enrolled in a training program of the IDF Air Force, in which he studied aircraft mechanics in the US.

His studio, and the café he frequented, became a gathering place for artists, poets, and writers, among them David Avidan, Yair Hurvitz, Aviva Uri, Prof. Gabriel Moked, Prof. Menachem Peri, Yona Wallach, Jacques Mory-Katmor, Ami Shavit, Benni Efrat, and others.

[6] He was also an enthusiastic reader of science fiction and was generally interested in altered states of consciousness, which led to his participation in studies on psychedelic drugs conducted at the time by the Ministry of Health.

[8] It was later shown at the Israeli gallery Tempo Rubato (2014) and was included in the Tate Modern exhibition "The World Goes Pop" in 2015–2016.

Their guiding principle was the idea of “doing things differently,” by aiming to transcend the artists’ individual styles through collaboration and non-conventional exhibitions.

Another influential position he held was as a teacher in the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, where between 1971 and 1977 he taught three-dimensional design in the Department of Architecture and Town Planning, in collaboration with Yitzhak Danziger.

In October 2004, a retrospective exhibition of BarEl's work was held at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.

The museum also published a selection of his critical, pedagogical, and theoretical writings in Between Sobriety and Innocence – On Plastic Arts in the 1960s in Tel Aviv (2004).