The Shiff Prize was founded in 2008 by collector Dubi Shiff in memory of his father, Haim Shiff, a hotelier and early supporter of Israeli art.
On the surface, there’s nothing dramatic about a crumpled piece of baking paper or a cheap sandwich bag. But in the hands of artist Ilana Dotan, these throwaway objects become hauntingly beautiful portraits of a culture built on convenience and consequence.
Last week, Dotan was named the recipient of the 2025 Haim Shiff Prize for Figurative-Realist Art, one of the most prestigious honors for Israeli artists working in the realist tradition.
Awarded by the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, the prize includes a $10,000 grant and a solo exhibition at the museum in 2026. The official ceremony was set to take place on July 23, marking another milestone in Dotan’s evolving and unexpectedly poignant career.
Born in Israel in 1967, Dotan didn’t follow the standard gallery-to-gallery path. After earning her degree from the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, she worked for years as a digital graphic designer, gradually returning to her sketchbook and charcoal. What began as quiet studio explorations turned into a body of work that is anything but quiet.
Her drawings, meticulously rendered in graphite and charcoal, feature everyday synthetic materials: cling film, bubble wrap, black garbage bags, and Styrofoam trays.
ILANA DOTAN; A crumpled piece of baking paper or a cheap sandwich bag become hauntingly beautiful portraits of a culture built on convenience and consequence. (credit: COURTESY OF THE ARTIST)
It’s a modern still life vocabulary, one made of plastic instead of porcelain. The subjects are industrial, but the treatment is intimate. Each crease, fold, and glint is captured with technical precision and an almost meditative calm.
“Their marginality becomes the message,” wrote the prize jury, led by Tel Aviv Museum of Art chief curator Mira Lapidot, curator Emanuela Calo, and art historian Prof. Ariel Hirschfeld. “These are the secondary props on the stage of modern life, transparent, fragile, and never meant to last. And yet, ironically, they do. They don’t decompose.”
Her drawings don’t shout, they whisper
It’s this contradiction between the disposable and the permanent that gives Dotan’s work its quiet punch. In a world addicted to speed, convenience, and packaging, she freezes the overlooked and forces us to look again. Her drawings don’t shout. They whisper.
The jury selected Dotan from among 160 applicants. She joins a long line of notable Shiff Prize recipients, from Amnon David Ar to Yossi Mark. But Dotan’s selection also signals a subtle shift: a realist artist focused not on portraiture or landscape but on what lines the bins of our kitchens and fills the aisles of our supermarkets.
The Shiff Prize, founded in 2008 by collector Dubi Shiff in memory of his father, Haim Shiff, a hotelier and early supporter of Israeli art, has grown into a cornerstone of the figurative-realism scene.
The annual exhibitions at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art have drawn wide attention, bringing painterly skill and visual storytelling back into focus in an art world often dominated by conceptual trends.
ILANA DOTAN; A crumpled piece of baking paper or a cheap sandwich bag become hauntingly beautiful portraits of a culture built on convenience and consequence. (credit: COURTESY OF THE ARTIST)
Dotan, for her part, doesn’t position herself as a critic. She simply draws what’s in front of her: things we touch and toss, items that exist on the fringes of consciousness.
But in doing so, she invites something more lasting. Her solo exhibition in 2026 will be the next opportunity for the public to enter her quiet world, where plastic shines, garbage folds like velvet, and nothing is ever quite as disposable as it seems.
