Israeli artist Aviv Grinberg works at an unlikely material source: the cleaning cupboard. For close to a decade, his practice has taken readymades, industrial plastic waste, defective containers, and household tools like carpet beaters and reassembled them into sculpture, painting, and installation. He calls the resulting body of work the Language of Cleanliness — and the name is doing more than describing his materials.
In Grinberg’s hands, an object built to scrub, beat, or contain becomes something closer to a creature: glossy, coiled, faintly anatomical. Mechanical Secretions (2022), assembled from industrial plastic waste, and Clayface (2024), a glazed ceramic knot of eyes and looping limbs, both trade on that tension — forms that are genuinely alluring to look at, built from materials associated with mess, waste, and things meant to be hidden away. That contrast is the point. For Grinberg, “cleanliness” is never a neutral state; it stands in for control, concealment, and the pressure toward order — personal as much as social.
The Israeli multidisciplinary artist, born in Herzliya in 1991 and now based in Tel Aviv, works across painting, sculpture, and installation, often at the point where the two disciplines blur. His most visible installation to date, I Opened the Door of Fire (2024), suspended a painted canvas from a bicycle wheel inside a historic water tower in Kiryat Tivon, adding a sound composition and a travel journal to the piece — turning the tower’s spiral stairwell itself into part of the work.
More recent paintings, including the large-scale Second Nature, First Nature (2026) and Valley of Dry Bones (2022), widen the vocabulary beyond household objects into organic imagery — folded, wounded, plant- and bone-like forms set against dark or storm-lit grounds. The shift brings an ecological register into work that was already asking what gets called clean, what gets called waste, and who decides.
Grinberg holds a BFA with Excellence from Shenkar College of Engineering, Design and Art (2017) and has shown solo at the Petah Tikva Museum of Art (Inflating Errors) and Corridor Contemporary (Synthetica), alongside group presentations at Givon Art Forum, Nassima Landau Art Space, and the Edmond de Rothschild Center, among others. He has held residencies with the NARS Foundation in New York, the Practical Magic Lab at Schechter Gallery, and the Mifal HaPais Art and Design Incubators, and was nominated for the Forbes Israel 30 Under 30 list.
Aviv Grinberg’s work is presented on Art Fair for introduction purposes. See the full profile, biography, and image gallery on his artist page.
