TEL AVIV.- An evening devoted to kinetic art will bring artists, cultural figures and members of Israel’s creative community together in Tel Aviv on August 20 for a tribute to the late Yaacov Agam, one of the pioneering figures of kinetic and optical art. The event will also mark the final days of Gil Goren’s solo exhibition WONDERLAB at The L Gallery.

Titled The World Is Not Whole, the gathering begins at 7 p.m. at the gallery’s space on Ahad Ha’am Street and takes place as Goren’s exhibition approaches its August 24 closing date. The program is expected to bring together artists and figures from the cultural sector alongside entrepreneurs and participants from the technology world.

Agam, who died in 2026 at the age of 98, spent decades exploring an art that depended on movement, perception and the changing position of the viewer. His work helped establish kinetic and optical art as major strands of postwar visual culture, making a memorial centered on movement particularly resonant. He was also named a recipient of the 2026 Israel Prize for Visual Arts.

Those ideas of change and perception find a contemporary echo in WONDERLAB, where Goren has assembled a colorful and deliberately restless environment of objects, images and materials. Curated by Katya Sinitsin, the exhibition avoids settling into a single medium or recognizable formula. Instead, it moves between handcrafted textiles, found imagery, advertising graphics, sculptural forms and kinetic works.

Among the pieces are hand-embroidered Gobelin works incorporated into the forms of surfboards, which Goren uses as symbols of Tel Aviv’s associations with openness, freedom and outdoor life. Elsewhere, street imagery drawn from Paris is reworked in new contexts, while authentic advertising posters—an echo of Goren’s parallel career in advertising and branding—are placed in conversation with elaborate floral still lifes.

Jerusalem also appears, not as a fixed image but as something reconstructed piece by piece.





That sense of assembling and dismantling runs throughout the show. Images and objects appear as fragments of memory and everyday experience, yet the exhibition repeatedly asks how those fragments can be brought together without pretending that they form a final or permanent whole.

Movement is especially important. In several works, it is not simply a visual effect added to the finished object. The appearance of a piece may shift as viewers change position, as light moves through the gallery or as the body enters into a different relationship with the work. The result is an exhibition that asks to be experienced over time rather than absorbed in a single glance.

Goren has described himself as a “visual hunter,” collecting urban signs, typography, cultural references, pop imagery, mechanical details, textures and discarded fragments before recombining them into layered compositions.

That approach gives WONDERLAB some of the immediacy of street culture and pop art, but the apparent spontaneity is counterbalanced by a strong emphasis on making. Embroidery, surfaces, construction and carefully handled materials remain visible, giving many of the works a distinctly handmade character.

For Goren, avoiding repetition is part of the point. Rather than developing one instantly recognizable visual device and returning to it indefinitely, he treats each work as an opportunity to challenge the solution reached in the previous one.

“Each work does not seek to confirm the solution proposed by the one before it, but rather to challenge it, undermine its stability and propose a new system of coordinates,” the artist said. He describes the approach as a way of keeping art “alive, open and dynamic,” while resisting familiar formulas and repetition.

Sinitsin similarly sees the exhibition as a place of ongoing experimentation.

“This is a true visual laboratory,” the curator said, describing a space where images, volumes, ideas and movement are continually taking shape. For her, the exhibition functions as a shifting kaleidoscope in which the works change with the viewer’s angle while retaining a high degree of craftsmanship and a clear connection to handmade processes.

Goren’s recent practice has moved between photography, printing, sculpture, text and mixed-media experimentation. His previous solo exhibition, Can You See Its Beauty, was presented at the Hermann Struck Museum in Haifa, and his work frequently draws on Israeli visual culture, public imagery and questions of collective memory.

The closing event places those concerns in conversation with Agam’s legacy. Although the two artists belong to different generations and work in different visual languages, the emphasis on motion, changing viewpoints and the active role of the spectator offers a natural point of connection.

The World Is Not Whole takes place Thursday, August 20, 2026, at 7 p.m. at The L Gallery, 13 Ahad Ha’am Street, Tel Aviv. Gil Goren’s WONDERLAB, curated by Katya Sinitsin, remains on view through August 24. Admission to the exhibition is free.