Large-scale oil paintings, sculptural installation, and video works examine themes of urban community and obsessive familial structures, interwoven with the Sisyphean nature of parenthood.

Bold, colorful paintings greet visitors at the entrance to the exhibition, facing a round well and a nipple-shaped chandelier that steadily drips liquid. The paintings depict a frenzied, embattled Tel Aviv—planes circling overhead, a jumble of images embedded within an urban landscape that merges Tel Aviv and Jaffa with pastoral kibbutz scenery. Visual winks and paraphrases from art history appear throughout. Among them are figures quoted from the works of Yohanan Simon, known for his depictions of kibbutz families during Israel’s early statehood.

Simon’s paintings offer an idyllic vision of family life—but the reality of kibbutz life was far from idyllic. Parents worked full-time; children, from birth, were raised communally in nurseries and children’s houses, removed from consistent parental care. Shira Gepshtein-Moshkovich references Simon’s works not to affirm them, but to explore the tension between his idealized portrayals and the less ideal realities they obscure.

The artist embeds Simon’s imagery into complex, vibrant compositions filled with the noise and volatility of contemporary urban life—depicting a third generation of Israeli familyhood. The figures in her paintings seem to hover at social gatherings centered around their children, emotional moments that echo the way the communal well once served as a hub of connection—a historical precursor to today’s social networks.

Amid this visual landscape stands the Green Well: a sculptural structure built of crudely connected wooden fragments, containing a murky pool of water and soaked sponge crumbs. The green sponge material—long a signature in Gepshtein-Moshkovich’s work—has often been sculpted into architectural forms: Jaffa houses, residential towers reaching skyward, miniature carved buildings preserved in jars of sponge juice. This time, however, the sponge has disintegrated. The imagery has melted into abstraction—green fragments absorbed by the form of the well, sinking into the murky liquid of its own making. Above, a nipple chandelier drips steadily into it, evoking a nursing child and a well-mother that absorbs and nourishes. But how long until she overflows? Can containment be sustained indefinitely?

Gepshtein-Moshkovich has a long-standing practice of building with fragile, perishable, almost disposable materials. The nipple chandelier becomes a one-time stand-in for the maternal breast—once natural and reusable, now synthetic and temporary. The dripping mimics the endless demand of infant care. The well fills and accepts, but is never done. The sponge-well juice becomes a metaphor for maternal containment—a vessel for others, stretched thin. As in her turbulent paintings, the potential for explosion always looms: colors may spill over, imagery may invade from all sides, and the sponge may saturate to the point of collapse.

Themes of containment, social isolation, and the relentless intensity of maternal labor reach poignant clarity in the exhibition’s video work. In it, Gepshtein-Moshkovich distills the endlessness of motherhood into a few minutes of washing baby bottles—repeating the sterilization of nipples and the flow of water, over and over, mirroring the ceaseless demands of care.

In The Green Well, through a richly expressive painterly language and a bold, sculptural vocabulary, Gepshtein-Moshkovich captures something essential about the rhythms of contemporary social and urban life—especially the structure of the modern family and the obsessive, Sisyphean labor of parenthood.