“Until recently, I had 20 people working at the studio. Now it’s only me here,” Tzachi Nevo, the owner of the Umasqu home decor and art design studio, tells ISRAEL21c.

Umasqu (short for Urban Masquerade), located in the artsy Kiryat Hamelacha neighborhood in South Tel Aviv, includes a showroom with a changing gallery as well as consulting services.

All the wooden home decor and art pieces are produced in the studio via a process that combines technology and hand craftsmanship. 

First came Covid, then war

“I used to work continuously with around 300 shops worldwide, from Gallery Lafayette to The Centre Pompidou,” says Nevo. “But then came the coronavirus and delivered the first blow.”

Nevo explains that the second blow was the war in Ukraine, which “cut the connection” with “the big market” in Russia. 

“And then came the war and finished most of the business we had outside Israel,” he adds, referring to the October 7 Hamas attacks and the subsequent armed conflict between Israel and the terror groups on its southwest and northern borders. 

Now, Umasqu’s main market is domestic. 

“I am selling well, but [the market] is not big enough to have a staff of people working here for me. That’s the reason that I’m working alone at the moment,” he says as he packs a massive artwork to ship to a customer later that day. 

Umasqu sells most of the products via its website. “It’s a direct-to-customer business model, so a lot of customers from abroad no longer buy things from us because we’re Israel-based,” explains Nevo. 

Long way to art

Nevo, 60, graduated from Jerusalem’s Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, with an industrial design degree, back in 1990. He went on to work in marketing for the next two decades before realizing that wasn’t what he truly wanted to do with his life. 

“Ten years ago, I had the opportunity to step back and think about what I really wanted to do, which was design,” explains Nevo.

“I didn’t have any kind of experience-based added value as an industrial designer. But I knew that I had the brain of a designer, of somebody who knows how to combine shapes and colors together. This is how I would characterize my work now.”

Nevo says his designs – including pieces inspired by African masks, Japanese kokeshi dolls, animals, retro household items, hamsas and other lucky charms — draw inspiration from the concept known as pareidolia. It is a phenomenon in which people see faces or patterns in ambiguous images, such as Jesus on toast.

The technique used to create Umasqu’s abstract artworks is not unique, but “what I developed is the combination; the right mixture that makes the art, you know, interesting,” says Nevo. 

“One of my secret ingredients is how I utilize the color. I use laser cutting, which is a very cheap technology, but when you paint it in the right way, it doesn’t look cheap.”

Umasqu’s designs are all indeed very brightly colored, which Nevo says reflects his love of art from the 1950s and 1960s. 

He adds that because he comes from the marketing world, he knew how to make the designs appealing to customers, which is why it only took the brand a couple of years to “take off.”

Making lemonade out of art 

Despite no longer attracting an international market, at least for now, the studio is not lacking orders to produce. 

“Google has four different wall decor pieces from me hanging in their offices in Tel Aviv; Amazon Israel is a big client of mine; Apple bought from me the rights to use one of my art designs as a graphic icon for one of their Apple Music playlists; I designed a special project for the Audemars Piguet, which is a high-level watch brand.

“I also work with a lot of hotel chains in Israel and abroad,” he adds. 

Nevo looked inward when creating his recent collection. It includes a tribute to the Western Negev, where the October 7 attacks took place. The area is associated with poppy flowers that bloom there every spring.

“I didn’t necessarily want to do something war-related; I’m not that kind of artist. I’m more of a comedian of the art world. But incorporating poppy flowers creates a connection to the Negev in a very aesthetic way.”

For more information on Umasqu, click here.