[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/Langberg-Inst_04.jpg?w=1024″]<\/p>\n
\n\tOn Friday, Doron Langberg, one of the most successful and well-known Israeli artists working today, will open his first New York exhibition in seven years at Jeffrey Deitch\u2019s Tribeca gallery. For the occasion, Langberg has so far opted to give a single interview\u2014to the New York Times<\/em>\u2014and to publish an accompanying 750-word text on Deitch\u2019s website addressing how his new body of work reflects the Israel-Palestine conflict.<\/p>\n \n\tLangberg has not spoken extensively about the issue in the past. The body of work for which he is best known consists of portraits and domestic scenes that explore queer life, gender, and sexuality. He has cited David Hockney, Wolfgang Tillmans, and Mickalene Thomas as influences; in a 2019 Jewish Currents<\/em> feature, Langberg and several other LGBTQIA+ painters, including Louis Fratino and Salman Toor, were described as part of a movement dubbed \u201cNew Queer Intimism.\u201d <\/p>\n \n\tA graduate of Yale University\u2019s prestigious art school, Langberg has been featured in exhibitions at the Leslie Lohman Museum in New York and the Schwules Museum in Berlin, had a piece commissioned by the Public Art Fund in New York, and a painting acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which briefly had it on view before closing its Modern and contemporary art wing, while it completes renovations.<\/p>\n \n\tBut, as Langberg told Times<\/em> interviewer Julia Halperin, footage of the destruction of Gaza in the years after the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023, left him with a creative block and the sense that he could no longer find \u201cthe same meaning\u201d in his work. The new body of work consists of monumental landscapes drawn from places of personal and political significance, including Drohobych, Ukraine, where his father was born and survived the Holocaust. Langberg said the works trace his process of questioning the meaning of his own Jewishness and the nature of home when that home \u201cperpetrates atrocities.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tWhile the choice of subject matter might make the connection to the conflict seem oblique, Langberg told Halperin that he wanted to be unambiguous about his political position. \u201cNo matter the circumstances, Palestinians deserve justice and liberation,\u201d he said. \u201cBy choosing to look away from unspeakable horrors under the auspices of protecting Jewish life, we destroy ourselves and countless others.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tIn the accompanying text on Deitch\u2019s website, Langberg described how visiting and painting the site connected to his family\u2019s Holocaust history, and then returning to New York, helped him see \u201ca worldview outside of the ideological vortex in Israel, with its intractable logic.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cBearing witness to the incalculable loss and cruelty that took place there through these small paintings, I thought of Gaza,\u201d he writes. \u201cThe large works I made when I returned to New York\u2014one describing a shadowy expanse of tree trunks, and the other illuminated treetops at night seen from the perspective of falling\u2014materialized both the life and death of my family in the forest they surely loved. Making these works allowed me to mourn them, grounding my grief as a personal experience rather than a means to justify endless cycles of bloodshed. Untangled from ideology, my history became a source of moral clarity.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tWhile Israel and Hamas agreed to a US-brokered ceasefire last fall that has largely held through multiple phases, the Israel Defense Forces have periodically conducted airstrikes on Gaza, killing 509 Palestinians since the October ceasefire was signed, according to Gaza\u2019s Health Ministry. Israel has said the strikes are in response to Hamas violations of the ceasefire. More than 70,000 Palestinians have been reported killed since October 2023, a figure the IDF has said it accepts.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n [analyse_source url=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/art-news\/news\/israeli-artist-doron-langberg-addresses-atrocities-gaza-1234775691\/”]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/Langberg-Inst_04.jpg?w=1024″] On Friday, Doron Langberg, one of the most successful and well-known Israeli artists working today, will open his first New York exhibition in seven years at Jeffrey Deitch\u2019s Tribeca gallery. For the occasion, Langberg has so far opted to give a single interview\u2014to the New York Times\u2014and to publish an accompanying 750-word […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-1808259","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1808259","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1808259"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1808259\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1808259"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1808259"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1808259"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}