Bat Yam Museum of Art

Museum · Contemporary art · Issachar Ber Ryback's work · Sholem Asch's art and Judaica collection · 10-20 ₪

6 Struma Street, Bat Yam

Bat Yam's museum of contemporary art, in a round brutalist building of exposed concrete in a park in the Ramat Yosef neighbourhood

The Bat Yam Museum of Art was founded in 1961 as a museum of modern art, and in its first decades showed local modern art, mainly painting and sculpture. Its round modernist building by the architect Yitzhak Perlstein, in the brutalist style of exposed concrete, holds an exhibition pavilion of about 1,000 square metres and stands in a park, laid out by the Israel Prize-winning landscape architects Lipa Yahalom and Dan Zur, at the heart of the Ramat Yosef neighbourhood, which Perlstein also planned. It reopened in 2007 as part of MOBY, the Museums of Bat Yam, and today shows contemporary art. MOBY is made up of three municipal museums: the Museum of Art, the house of the writer Sholem Asch, restored and reopened with exhibitions, literary evenings and writing workshops, and the house of the painter Issachar Ber Ryback; its site says the museum holds the largest collection in the world of Ryback's work and Asch's collection of art, Judaica and books.