A bold stroke: Broken Fingaz trades the wall for the canvas in new Tel Aviv show

The smell of fresh oil paint still hangs in the air at “No Way Around It,” the first comprehensive solo exhibition by Broken Fingaz in Tel Aviv. Presented at the Nassima Art Foundation, the works were created specifically for the show, marking a new phase for the internationally acclaimed collective.

While Broken Fingaz has exhibited internationally for years, from major street art festivals and public commissions to group shows and institutional exhibitions, this presentation explores the act of painting itself and the physical experience of working with oil on canvas.

Broken Fingaz is composed of core members Tant, Unga, and Deso. The artists have worked together since the early 2000s, forming a continuous collaborative structure that has remained intact across geographies, working conditions, and production formats. That continuity reads less like stability and more like a line repeatedly drawn over itself, thickening rather than breaking.

For this exhibition, the collective has produced a body of oil paintings, drawings, and wooden sculptures. The works were developed within their shared studio pracwtice rather than as individually authored works. The production process, according to the collective, is collaborative and iterative, with works often evolving through internal exchange rather than a linear process of individual execution.

Throughout its practice, Broken Fingaz has worked in multiple formats, including large-scale murals, screen printing, animation, and installation. These formats are used in parallel rather than sequentially, forming a practice that moves between street-based production and institutional display, without fully abandoning either. Its practice behaves less like a ladder than a circuit – images returning in altered form, depending on where they appear.

According to the exhibition materials, the works in “No Way Around It” mark a shift in medium and approach. Earlier works associated with the collective often relied on graphic clarity and narrative structures developed for public visibility and reproduction. The new works combine figurative and abstract elements within layered compositions, in which forms are continuously reworked within the painted surface.

The shift into oil painting introduced different conditions from those that characterized earlier street and graphic production. Oil painting requires slower development, longer production cycles, and a more layered accumulation of decisions over time. If graffiti operates like a fast wound that closes as soon as it opens, oil painting behaves more like scar tissue, thicker, slower, resistant to erasure. Within this context, the works are presented as studio-based objects rather than public interventions.

In recent canvases like Unga’s Broken Wing and Lake Atitlan, along with Deso’s Egg Thief and Soul Rescue, this material shift is laid bare. Figures stretch and melt into dense color fields, showing a departure from clean digital outlines. Similarly, Tant’s Silver Lake and Depth Charged extend this intuitive and experimental approach to figuration, where the paint itself carries an atmospheric weight. The canvas becomes a dense ecosystem where images rarely breathe, oscillating between carnival and collapse.

In an interview ahead of the exhibition, Tant and Unga describe the show as a consolidation of the collective’s current working phase.

“I feel, in a way, that this is kind of our first exhibition,” he says, “or at least the first exhibition in our current incarnation, where we became kind of obsessive about painting.”

He continues: “It’s the first time we managed to somewhat package everything that happens with us in the studio and bring it out and say to people: ‘Here, this is what we do.’”

The move into a gallery context fixes this studio process within an institutional frame. Works that were previously developed in relation to public space and temporary conditions are now presented as objects intended for sustained viewing. The wall, once a surface of urgency and disappearance, becomes containment.

For Broken Fingaz, working almost as one unit felt natural from the start. The origins of that approach are tied to the childhood environments of two of its core members, Tant and Unga, who grew up in Haifa within an experimental artistic collective known as the Tav Group.

The Tav Group consisted of several families that lived and worked together in a valley near the foot of Mount Carmel.

“They were architects, designers, artists,” Tant recalls. “They created installations in nature, sculpture in the woods. They also designed exhibitions and buildings, and they lived together.

“We lived together, five families,” he says. “I was born there and grew up there until age 10, until the authorities made us leave.

“It was a very, very special place, a way of life, very communal, completely amazing, perfect as a child, at least from our experience.”

Within this environment, creative work was integrated into daily life. Work occurred in shared spaces and involved collaboration among adults who operated collectively.

“They were always doing projects, and we were part of it; we saw dad working in the studio, and dad and his friends creating installations together.

“It was very, very, very natural that this is how you create art, and it is together.”

Artistic production was continuous and collective, without clear division between authorship roles.

After the dissolution of the Tav Group environment and the relocation of the families, this model of shared production did not disappear. It reemerged later in different forms, first in graffiti practice during adolescence and later in the formal structure of the collective.

What had been a domestic ecology of making became, under different conditions, an urban one, less protected, more exposed, but structurally similar in its insistence on “together.”

Broken Fingaz began operating formally in 2001 in Haifa within the local graffiti scene. At this stage, the members were working outside institutional frameworks and without formal artistic training. The formation of a graffiti crew was based on functional and material conditions of production rather than a defined artistic program.

“In graffiti, there is this thing called a crew,” Tant explains. “It has to be, because there has to be someone who watches your back while you do a piece.”

The crew structure functions as a practical system for collaboration in public space, particularly in environments where graffiti is executed quickly and often under conditions of illegality or risk.

“And then that thing is formed,” he continues, “and then when you pour the values or aesthetics we grew up on into this thing, something new is created that is unique to us and that we sort of nurtured over all the years.”

Graffiti, both Unga and Tant agree, operates through repetition, visibility, and spatial placement. It involves the repeated marking of names or symbols within the urban environment.

“The basic essence of doing graffiti is writing your name as many times as possible,” Tant says. “It is not political. I see it as a sort of game.”

“The graffiti that was created in the late ’70s, early ’80s, before the social messages and all kinds of street paintings... specifically this graffiti we are talking about. Its goal is to put your name as big as possible in the most central place, as many times as possible.”

For the graffiti crews, the city functions as a field of competing visual systems, including advertising, signage, and other forms of public communication. Graffiti operates by occupying space without authorization. The city becomes a layered surface that is constantly overwritten, where visibility is temporary and contested.

“It happens in the city; it cannot happen in a village,” Tant notes. “Because you are surrounded by so many advertisements and images and signs, and then you come and take your space, because nobody will give it to you, and you don’t have money to buy a billboard. So it is political in the anarchist sense, or in the activist sense of: I come and simply take direct action. Every such action is a political action of sorts.”

The practice is also shaped by its temporal conditions. Works are often removed, overwritten, or painted over shortly after execution.

“You paint something, invest time, think, and the next day they buff it. You get used to it,” Tant recalls. “After it happens for years, it really affects you. You are like, okay... you become a bit numb in a good way. You saw they erased your work there – also good, fine. I had fun painting it, I even have a photo; fine.”

That repeated erasure functions almost like a training system: it removes attachment before it can stabilize.

As the collective expanded from local graffiti into international mural production, animation, and institutional exhibitions, its working method developed into a distributed practice operating across geography and time.

Broken Fingaz has exhibited at institutions including the Royal Academy of Arts, Saatchi Gallery, Urban Nation Museum in Berlin, MIMA in Brussels, and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, as well as in group exhibitions such as “Beyond the Streets,” which focuses on graffiti and street practices in institutional contexts.

Throughout this expansion, the collective maintained anonymity regarding individual authorship.

“By our very nature we are quite anonymous people – we don’t like our faces preceding us,” Unga says. “It is just something that feels natural to us.”

“Originally, it comes from not wishing to expose your identity because what you are doing is illegal,” explains Unga. “But it became a habit, a part of who we are. It also gives the art more space to shine. If you Google ‘Broken Fingaz,’ the results show our art, not our photos. We think it’s cool.”

The collective operates across multiple geographic locations. Unga is based in London, while Tant lives in Klil in northern Israel, and Deso lives in Switzerland. Despite this physical separation, the collective maintains continuous communication.

“We got used to it,” Tant explains. “There was the Haifa period, in the beginning, where we lived together, created together, traveled together.” After that, for almost a decade, they operated almost like a single body moving from project to project.

“Now we meet only a few times a year, but we talk on Zoom almost every day. We show things to each other, share all the time, and talk about directions and insights.”

He describes the collective as a shared system of visual production rather than a set of individual practices.

“As a group, we created a language, a ‘bag of imagery,’ and a message – this whole thing that we share. It belongs to all of us. We can take from it, and we can contribute to it. It is the entity that we created.

“Within that, everyone has space to express themselves and to reflect their character and individual issues. It is a personal expression. There is absolute freedom in the sense that you can bring anything, you can use this pool, and there is no sense of mine and yours – this was my idea; I want it.

“No, it is the opposite; everyone brings. In the end, everyone benefits. There is no hierarchy of authorship. Nobody really knows who did what; and that, even on an ego level, usually doesn’t matter.”

When called to produce a mural for a festival or a city, execution often diverges from initial sketches during production, with adjustments made on site as the work develops.

“The process is very dynamic; it can happen in different ways,” Tant explains. “A lot of times we approach a project, and we all work on it at the beginning, sending sketches to each other, bringing ideas. Sometimes we leave the choice to the festival, and we are fine with whatever they choose. Then we execute it together, and even in execution, there is no one-to-one relationship with the sketch.

“On the last wall we did in Italy, there was a sketch by Deso, and when we arrived, everyone added something along the way. ‘Wait, maybe here it is better like this, let’s erase that, let’s change this.’ In the end, even if it starts as one person’s idea, it becomes something else entirely.

“You do need to let go. You think you had a plan, but then the work shifts. It’s a matter of dynamics: we know each other well, so sometimes someone has a clear vision, and the others let go, and sometimes we all adjust together.”

On occasions, they have to respond to scale limitations, adapting materials to the requirements of large architectural surfaces.

“In the last painting we did in Italy, we had to invent new tools,” Tant says, describing how, after being immersed in studio work for a long period, they had to adjust to working out in the street again. “We were released with all this energy to bring our new art from the studio out, but suddenly we were stuck because there were no brushes in that size.

“So we started experimenting, went to the hardware store and bought everything. In the end, we connected two brooms with screws and used them as a brush. We used rags and giant sponges, and we called it the octopus because it looked like a strange creature. You work standing on a lift, so your movement is limited. You dip the octopus in a bucket of paint with both hands and move it on the wall to the person standing on the lift next to you, who takes it from there and continues the line. Then, when you step back, it looks like a single continuous line.”

By the mid-2010s, the collective encountered the influence of digital circulation systems on visual production. Works that translated effectively into online formats often received higher visibility and engagement, introducing a feedback loop between image production and platform reception.

“If you look at our Instagram page, the work was so consistent; everything was very coherent, and got many likes.

Everyone loved that sort of thing, those images. Then, suddenly, we upload images that receive maybe two likes. Our audience doesn’t understand what is going on with us,” Unga explains.

“That is the negative effect of social media, because everything is so immediate. There are a lot of artists who are affected by this.

“If you are used to receiving many likes, and then you upload something and it doesn’t get them, the algorithm kind of pushes you to do things that people like. What that creates is doing things that work – meaning, things that look good on a screen, things that are familiar because people like that. It becomes very clear. So it is a bit of a struggle.”

In response, the collective shifted toward oil painting.

During this period, the collective also studied informally with instructors in Haifa. These studies focused on composition, structure, and painting technique.

“Not formally, but we had different teachers along the way. “We studied with Gennady, a high school teacher a lot of people in Haifa had studied with,” Tant recounts.

“Later, about seven years ago, Anna Lukashevsky from the Barbizon group moved to Haifa, and that was at the time when we wanted to start doing oil paintings. We took lessons with her, which was for a short period, admittedly, but at least for me it had a strong influence.

“Technically she had a lot of knowledge, and also she opened my mind to artists I didn’t understand before, or [whose works, I] thought, were, like, disgusting stuff, and she laughed at me, like I was a child. And slowly I started to understand.”

The shift in medium also changed the way earlier artistic influences resurfaced in their work.

“We always loved art. We knew a bit, we had books at home by David Hockney and Matisse and so on, but that didn’t feel relevant when we were kids. Now, from our perspective at this time, it is much more relevant,” Tant says.

He describes this process as a reversal of influence tracing:

“In music, you listen to hip-hop and then you start looking for the samples, and then you realize it comes from punk bands, and then who influenced them, and you dig backward.

“It happened to us, too. Over time, what we did didn’t give us the satisfaction we needed, the excitement, the challenge, the depth, and we found all that in painting.”

The transition also resulted in a period of reduced digital visibility, which they chose to accept as a necessary condition for their stylistic development.

Having to dig deep, Tant admits that the group helps. “Also now, because we do work separately and there are days, hours, when you are by yourself and so on, there is always support. There are three minds working together, in partnership, toward a specific goal.”

When one looks at the works in “No Way Around It” at Nassima, there is a sense of joy, of painting as something done for its own sake, of the pleasure of creating an image through the act itself.

“When you say that, it is really the best compliment we can get,” say Unga and Tant. “It is saying to us ‘Wow, how fun it was to have this color in the studio,’ and yes, that is what it feels like to us.”

At the same time, the process carries its own internal tensions, with moments of difficulty and doubt, held alongside a steady sense of direction.

“There is suffering, and there are dilemmas, and anger, and crises, and the sketch isn’t moving forward, and what I thought doesn’t work – of course there are. But still, this joy fits perfectly here,” Tant explains.

“Being here at the opening and seeing young guys who don’t necessarily go to exhibitions coming and enjoying it, that was really cool for us, because it is as if we managed for a moment to carry you into our passion for painting, and make it look relevant.”