Alex Tubis
Alex Tubis (born 1978, Moscow) is an Israeli artist working primarily in figurative painting. His pictures combine close observation with a sense of suspended time. People, rooms, empty sports grounds and unassuming Israeli landscapes appear recognizable yet quietly estranged. To an international audience, Tubis is also known as the painter behind much of the art attributed to the fictional Akiva in the Israeli series Shtisel.
Moscow, migration and the choice of painting
Tubis was born in Moscow in 1978 and moved to Israel with his family in 1990, at the age of twelve. Migration did not become a literal program for his art, yet displacement, distance and the attempt to inhabit a new place recur in the mood and titles of several exhibition projects.
As a teenager he was deeply interested in cinema, especially the films of Andrei Tarkovsky and Krzysztof Kieślowski. His decisive turn toward painting came after encountering works by Diego Velázquez and Paolo Veronese. In the old masters he found something film could not provide in the same way: color, light and brushwork producing psychological truth in a single material object.
The cinematic interest never disappeared. Many of Tubis’s compositions resemble frames from stories whose beginnings and endings remain outside the picture. Yet he does not imitate photography. Figures and spaces retain the resistance of paint, and the duration of looking at a canvas differs fundamentally from the instant captured by a camera.
Bezalel and the first exhibitions
After military service, Tubis studied at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem and took part in its graduate exhibition in 2005. In 2007 the Jerusalem Artists’ House presented Interior, his first solo exhibition, featuring oil paintings, drawings and mixed-media works.
The exhibition text already identified lasting qualities of his art: portraits of people close to him placed in interiors, landscapes of Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, and a realism that never sought to reproduce photographic reality. Tubis was less interested in the outward spectacle of a subject than in its internal pressure — intimacy, silence and a faint sense of separation.
Later solo exhibitions were held at Gallery Irrgang in Leipzig and the Jerusalem Artists’ House in 2009, venues in Jaffa and Rishon LeZion in 2014, Dan Gallery in Tel Aviv in 2016, the Artists’ House in Tel Aviv in 2017, and Ben-Gurion University’s gallery in Beersheba in 2018. He also participated in Fresh Paint, Berlinerliste and group exhibitions in Israel.
Artistic language
Tubis belongs to a contemporary figurative tradition, but his realism is neither academic reconstruction nor a display of hyperrealist virtuosity. The image remains visibly painted: brushwork is present, color constructs volume, and light establishes an emotional condition rather than merely describing an object. His portraits often depend on a pause, a moment when the sitter no longer performs a public identity and seems to enter private time.
He repeatedly chooses people he knows and ordinary places. The modesty of the motif is not the same as neutrality. A room, yard, sports ground or urban edge becomes a stage for solitude, memory and vulnerability. Instead of dramatic action, the viewer is offered sustained attention. The picture withholds a finished story while creating the conditions in which one can be imagined.
The old masters remain important. Velázquez offers psychological precision and light that models a living presence; Veronese offers chromatic and spatial freedom. At the same time, the modern restraint of Tubis’s work reflects the cinema of the later twentieth century. Classical composition meets the incomplete certainty of auteur film.
Subjects and series
On his official website, Tubis groups works under landscapes, people, watercolors, still lifes and flowers, and empty sports grounds. The last group is especially revealing. Places associated with noise, bodily movement and competition are shown without participants. Absence becomes the event, while goalposts, markings and stands remain as traces of recent or anticipated life.
Interiors and portraits function similarly. Tubis avoids an obvious psychological thesis. A sitter may be physically present, but the feeling is not decoded for the viewer. We are asked not to solve the person but to remain beside the person’s silence. This ability to produce closeness without sentimentality later became essential to his television work.
The paintings of Shtisel
In the first season of Shtisel, Akiva’s drawings were made by Israeli illustrator Menahem Halberstadt. When the character developed toward oil painting, the production invited Tubis. He barely knew the series and initially assumed that the offer came from a small student project.
Tubis arrived at the meeting with examples of more fashionable contemporary painting, believing his own classical figurative language might seem insufficiently current. The producers wanted precisely his work. He went on to create Boy with a Goldfish, portraits of Libbi and Racheli, and other paintings presented on screen as Akiva’s.
The process combined commission and collaboration. Writers described the dramatic task and proposed visual references; Tubis prepared studies before making the final canvas. Édouard Manet’s The Fifer was one point of departure for Boy with a Goldfish. The goal was not a literal illustration of a scene but a convincing independent painting able to carry memory and emotion within the drama.
Michael Aloni, who plays Akiva, learned basic painting technique from Tubis. Some close views of the hand at work show the painter himself. As a result, the art does not behave like decorative props: the body before the easel, the movement of the brush and the material accumulation of paint all contribute to the character.
For a broader reading of the artist’s role in the series, see ArtOnline’s feature Shtisel: An Artist Between Calling, Family and Faith.
Teaching and the Haredi program
Tubis has taught drawing and painting at Bezalel, including students in a Haredi program. The work unexpectedly extended the subject of the series beyond the set. Classes observed religious limits in the selection of models and visual material, but the professional questions of drawing, composition, light and color remained the same.
Teaching allowed him to encounter diversity within a community often perceived from outside as uniform. The meeting did not take place as an abstract argument between religion and modernity, but in the practical space of a studio — through a pose, a line, a color decision and the discussion of a finished exercise.
Significance
The international success of Shtisel brought Tubis’s name to viewers far beyond the Israeli art world. His independent practice, however, is broader than the television project. The screen paintings were a natural extension of an established language: attention to close relationships, the drama of silence and light, and the sense that an image can contain more time than a single moment.
Tubis occupies a distinctive place in contemporary Israeli painting. He uses classical means without turning them into nostalgia. His realism remains open to migration, suburban space, solitude and slow observation. His collaboration with Shtisel also demonstrated that painting on screen can be more than decoration: it can act as a full participant in dramatic storytelling.
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