Phase (Frozen Tree), 2025

Born Netanya, Israel, 1974; Lives and works in Tel Aviv, Israel. Graduate of the Art Department, Hamidrasha School of Art, Beit Berl Academic College, Israel. Tal Shochat works in photography, staging both figures and objects to create symbolically-laden images that often question the boundary between nature and artifice.

Shochat "stages" her trees, which undergo a process that prepares them to be objectified by her lens. At times the background is black; in another case, in an equally beautiful photograph, the background is a rug of the type sometimes called "Persian."

The photographs of the trees—whether pomegranate, olive, palm, plum, orapple—avoid the ideological groundwork enforced by Israeli culture on those who wish to observe them. Visually speaking, Shochat's trees detach themselves from it completely, and the viewer faces the tree when everything not beautiful has, ostensibly, been cut away.

She has exhibited extensively in Israel and the US, with solo exhibitions at Rosenfeld Gallery, Tel Aviv (2017;2008; 2005; 2003); Petach Tikva Museum of Art (2017); the National Museum of American Jewish History, Philadelphia (2012); Herzliya Museum of Art, Israel (2007); and Haifa Museum of Art, Israel (1999), among many other exhibitions at leading art spaces over the world.
Shochat received in 2015 the Minister of Culture and Sport's Visual Art Award, and the Israeli Ministry of Education and Culture Prize for a Young Artist in 2005. Her works are included in many international collections, private and public: The Victoria and Albert Museum, London; The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA); The Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Haifa Museum of Art; The Doron Sebbag Art Collection, ORS Ltd., Tel Aviv; The Shpilman Institute of Photography, Tel Aviv; Judah L. Magnes Museum, Berkeley, California.