Tartakover - Tel Aviv

A small hardbound book featuring drawings of Tel Aviv from the years 2015–2020 by David Tartakover — graphic designer, artist, curator, collector, and recipient of the Israel Prize for Design (2002) — who redefined the language of Israeli design. The drawings, made in a black pocket-sized Moleskine notebook, are reproduced at a 1:1 scale.

The book includes a text by curator and Israeli art scholar Tali Tamir: "Artist and designer David Tartakover grew up in Jerusalem, yet he has never stopped sketching Tel Aviv, where he has lived for over fifty years. A black Moleskine pocket notebook and a fine black marker are his daily bread as a sketcher, guided by the eye, capturing in a single glance an endless flux of shifting forms — and translating them directly into a responsive hand.

"Sketch quickly, with light touches in your sketchbook, which should always be with you,” advised Leonardo to a young painter in his Treatise on Painting (1632), “and when one notebook is filled — take up another…” Tartakover has done just that, in a long sequence of notebooks filled over the years, each celebrating his personal visual script: a rapid and decisive black line, unembellished and unapologetic, attentive to shifting thicknesses, swiftly tracking changing rhythms, commanding densities and areas of blank white space. Tree canopies meet tangled shrubbery lines; the soft contours of old stone houses brush up against the straight lines of Bauhaus buildings, giving way to the skeletons of rising vertical towers. Power lines cross lampposts, signs, and cranes, completing the urban chaos.

Tartakover’s gaze is hungry for the city. It follows, traces, and shadows its constant transformations, zooming into details and pulling back for panoramic views — a gaze that knows the city from within and reorganizes it on the page into a dense, vibrant meeting of forms and lines. His sketching territory centers around Neve Tzedek — his home until recently — and the surrounding streets of South Tel Aviv, extending toward Allenby Street and Rothschild Boulevard. He is not sketching a foreign city, but intimate landscapes, deeply familiar and part of his everyday surroundings.

In a long tradition of urban sketchers, Tartakover sits on a Tel Aviv bench in the 2000s, under the shade of a tree, placing his espresso cup beside him, and sketches the city unfolding before him — in motion, ever-changing, the city that never stops. From page to page, he appears at his best: an unbound sketcher, observant and responsive, capturing time and life."