Twenty years. One medium. No shortcuts.

About
Avi Tal

Born in Beer-Sheva, 1986, to parents who left everything behind to flee the Soviet Union. A desert city. A wide sky. Not much else.

He found spray cans at sixteen.

He never put them down.

What followed was not a hobby, not a phase, not a career choice. It was a discipline, and it has not broken since.

Before he ever touched a wall at scale, he spent a decade building model aircraft. Studying how structure holds under stress. Learning aerodynamics the way a painter studies light. He went on to study at the Technion in Haifa, an engineering mind that would eventually be applied to surfaces with no right angles and no margin for error.

From 2009 to 2012 he lived in the Netherlands, painting across Europe, sharpening his formal education on real walls in real cities.

He came back to the desert.

Back in Israel, he began reshaping what large-scale public art could look like in this country. He worked with the Neot Hovav Regional Council to transform an industrial complex in the Negev—over 2,500 square meters of mural work on a landscape most people drive through without looking up.

Then came March 1, 2016.

He stood alone outside Dimona's soccer stadium with spray cans and nothing else. No projector. No stencil. No assistance. When he finished, 2,038.96 square meters of the exterior walls had been painted entirely by hand. Guinness World Records confirmed what the work had already made obvious — it had never been done before.

His work is on walls across Israel. Facades, civic buildings, youth centers, and skateparks are surfaces that belong to everyone in cities from the Negev to the north.

At the Beer-Sheva Youth Center, the graffiti program he curated became so embedded in the life of the city that what began as a rotating exhibition every two years was made permanent. The Municipality of Beer-Sheva constructed a dedicated 52-meter concrete wall in the Old City specifically for his Art of Independence installation. His work holds a permanent place in the collection of the Museum of the Negev. In Hadera, he painted an entire concrete skatepark from ground to lip.

He also built the scene itself. As curator of the Bat-Yam Beach Walk Graffiti event, he brought Bates—one of the most respected graffiti artists in the world—alongside the top tier of Israeli artists, creating the kind of international exchange this country's street art culture had rarely seen. In Dimona, he assembled ten of the country's finest artists for a three-day festival that put the city on the cultural map.

Alongside the monumental, there is the intimate.

For over 6 years, in collaboration with community leader Amram Aklom, the brother of Ferede Alkum, he has built memorial and heritage spaces for the Ethiopian Jewish community, physical acts of preservation, history pressed into material so it cannot be forgotten or erased.

In August 2024, he was invited by the Israeli-American Council to contribute to Hostage Square Chicago—a landmark public art installation held during the Democratic National Convention, led by Chicago philanthropist Jeff Aeder. Chosen to tell the story of October 7 in his own artistic language, it was among the most personally significant commissions of his career. That same year, he became the first artist in Israel to paint a full aircraft—a Skyvan—using spray cans alone.

He works under the name Spine B7.

The name is a street tag.

The work is a different thing entirely.

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Contact

Avi Tal takes on a limited number of projects each year.
Murals, installations, and environments built to last. If you have something worth making, let's talk.