Gilad Ashery is the Recipient of the Ilana Elovic - Bezalel Prize for Excellence in the Arts 2025

Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design Jerusalem together with Dr. Eugene Elovic and Family are proud to announce that the recipient of the Ilana Elovic-Bezalel Prize for Excellence in the Arts 2025 is Gilad Ashery. Gilad is a graduate with honors of the Department of Fine Arts at Bezalel Academy.

According to the Selection Committee: "Gilad is a sculptor whose practice unfolds within a rich and layered world, intertwining material inquiries into transience, corporeality, and dislocation with ritual acts rooted in both personal and collective narratives. He works with elemental substances such as mud and wood, weaving them into existing objects such as cabinets and doors, and creates installations that are both wondrous and enigmatic. His works often carry performative and ritual dimensions, involving communities of artists or a solitary body in processes that summon human gestures across the continuum between birth and burial. The viewer encounters primal or childlike expressions of sexuality, monstrous figures, and fragments of the body embedded within shifting constructions that engage with states of matter, temperature, and density. The result is a constellation of complex and surprising environments that stand in opposition to an era marked by the collapse of values and a chilling sense of detachment, offering instead a space for reflection and melancholy on primordial worlds.”

Selection Committee Members: Chair - Jossef Krispel, Head of the Department of Fine Arts; Prof. Sharon Yaari, lecturer in the Department of Photography; Prof. Yehudit Sasportas, lecturer in the Department of Fine Arts; and Vardit Gross, a curator and director and Chief Curator of Artport , as public representative.

The prize ceremony in the presence of Dr. Eugene Elovic and family will be held on October 28, 2025 at the Ilana Elovic Gallery in Bezalel Academy's Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Campus.

Previous recipients of the Prize are: Ron Asulin (2024), Essa Grayeb (2023), Danielle Kaganov (2022), Tal Engelstein (2021), Asaf Elkalai (2018), Oree Holban (2017), Esther Schneider (2016), Yitzhak Golombek (2014).

Ilana Elovic passed away in 2006 after battling with cancer. Ilana dedicated her life to art, and worked in different mediums, including painting, ceramics, glass and jewelry design. Upon learning of her illness, Ilana began to engage almost exclusively in her artistic work. 

The prize in memory of Ilana is intended to help and encourage young artists at the start of their careers and is awarded to graduates of Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design Jerusalem, up to 7 years from their graduation.