Yonatan Kochva
MAS972

A multidisciplinary artist working at the intersection of street art, design, technology and urban culture.

Statement

My work combines graffiti, industrial objects, lighting, video and projection installations, and asks how everyday materials from the urban environment can be given new meaning. I treat an industrial object as a three-dimensional canvas — a place where material, colour, light and movement meet.

My works explore the meeting between physical and digital space, between raw material and contemporary technology, and between street culture and the world of art and design.

My language is colourful, direct and at times sarcastic. I want to make work that invites people to stop, look again at their surroundings, and find beauty in unexpected places.

הצהרת אמן

אני אמן רב־תחומי הפועל בצומת שבין אמנות רחוב, עיצוב, טכנולוגיה ותרבות אורבנית.

העשייה שלי משלבת גרפיטי, אובייקטים תעשייתיים, תאורה, וידאו ומיצבי הקרנה. אני מתייחס לאובייקטים תעשייתיים כאל קנבס תלת־ממדי — מקום שבו חומר, צבע, אור ותנועה נפגשים.

השפה האמנותית שלי היא צבעונית, ישירה ולעיתים סרקסטית. אני שואף ליצור עבודות שמזמינות אנשים לעצור ולהסתכל מחדש על הסביבה שלהם.

Legal precedent · Tel Aviv-Yafo Magistrate's Court · 9 December 2024

Street art is a copyright-protected work — even on a public wall.

Kochva & Tabak v. Dahan Peretz (C.C. 39402-10-19). Filed in 2019 and decided five years later by Judge Ron Goldstein, the case asked directly whether the Copyright Act protects street art. It does. The court found infringement of both the economic and the moral right across a series of works — among them Owl with Hand and Panda — and awarded ₪75,000 to Yonatan Kochva and ₪55,000 to the widow of the late Damian Tabak, plus costs and fees.

Damian Tabak died of cancer at thirty-five while the case was pending; his widow continued it in his place. The artists were represented by Tony Greenman and Omer Halevi.

The judge closed by noting he had written the ruling in Kiryat Hamelacha, where the brutalist workshops of the 1960s serve as a canvas for the city's street art — a living urban museum.

Graffiti & urban work

Characters that make a stranger smile.

Commissioned murals across Israel and Europe, gallery work, painted objects and vehicles. Clean lines, a joyful and sarcastic register, and a street agenda: turn neglected structures into something worth looking at.

Ordered by what people actually responded to — ranked against engagement across 201 posts. The rats came first, and they still do.

Commissioned interiors

Offices, bars and private walls. The brief is usually ‘something with character’ and no more than that, which is the brief I want. These are painted on site, floor to ceiling, around doors and light switches and whatever else is already on the wall.

In the public record

Documented works

Murals photographed and archived on Wikimedia Commons — the Petah Tikva Market shopfront series, Kiryat Hamelacha, Florentin, Rothschild, Washington Street, Charles Clore and HaShaon beaches, Park HaMesila, Shivat Tzion in Haifa, Shlomo HaMelech in Jerusalem, and the Custom House.

Named pieces in the archive include Karpion King, Mad Bunny, Kofiko, Panda, Rat, Mouse, Turtle, Chef, Crocodile, Falafel, Looking Chiled and RAK HAYOM. The Kofiko piece illustrates the Hebrew Wikipedia article for the television series.

Photographs © their makers and reproduced under the licences they chose: Nizzan Cohen (CC BY 4.0), Bukvoed (CC BY 4.0), Ovedc (CC BY-SA 4.0), Yaffa Phillips (CC BY-SA 2.0) and Israel Preker / PikiWiki (CC BY 2.5). The murals are mine; the photographs are theirs. Credit is given here for the same reason I went to court over it.

The archive on Wikimedia Commons ▸

Education

MAS Graffiti School

The first structured graffiti workshops in Israel, founded in 2001 and running ever since. Private lessons and group workshops, taught by MAS972 in partnership with ARTA Israel on Nachalat Binyamin in Tel Aviv, using Montana Gold and Montana Cans.

A session covers the spray itself — pressures, cap types, the different Montana ranges — then the techniques: silhouettes, drips, fades and effects. Everyone paints on a real wall. Groups run to about ten participants, from age twelve up. Beginners welcome; most people leave having finished a piece.

@masgraffitischool ▸Book a workshop ▸

Installation

Industrial Resurrection

Five industrial metal barrels. Three shown finished — painted, cut open, lit from within. The other two worked on live across the run of the exhibition, so the audience sees the transformation happen rather than only its result. Video and digital media are projected onto the barrels and into the room, so light and movement hold a conversation with the raw steel.

The work takes its cue from street culture and from the possibility of finding beauty and meaning in objects that were abandoned or lost their original purpose. A barrel is a container for something industrial and toxic; cut it open, plant it, light it, and it becomes the opposite of what it was built for.

Urban Abstracts

A collaborative audiovisual installation with projection mapping by FLAYSH. Painted panels become screens: the graffiti stays where it is and the light moves across it, so the same surface reads differently second to second. Graffiti meeting projection mapping.

LOOP · Continuous Disruption

Hand-drawn letterforms and characters are fed into generative systems; what comes back is re-processed and fed in again, indefinitely. An open studio as a live laboratory, with real-time projection and a documented archive of each pass. It asks where artistic identity sits when a machine is a collaborator.

Available to exhibit

Industrial Resurrection is built, specified and documented. It travels: five barrels, a projector and a dark room. Enquiries through the contact page.

Curation · 2014

The Babushka Show

Sixty artists. Five blank wooden dolls each. No brief.

An international group exhibition I organised and curated with Kuli Alma — 14–21 November 2014, Mikve Israel 10, Tel Aviv, as a shop and a gallery at once. Every participating artist was handed a set of five unpainted matryoshkas and nothing else: no theme, no direction, no house style. What came back ranged from work of real gallery weight to jokes, and both belonged in the room.

The reason for choosing the matryoshka was the reason most people would have avoided it. It is a dead medium — a souvenir, a shelf object, a thing associated with tourist stalls rather than with contemporary art. That is exactly what made it useful. Put a graffiti writer or a tattoo artist in front of an object nobody takes seriously, in a format that gives them no help, and you find out what they actually do.

“A fascinating medium from the old classical world, meeting the new world through street art.”MAS972, speaking to Globes, November 2014

The five-doll format did the arguing for me. Bella Volovnik put a spider inside a man’s mouth so that opening the set from largest to smallest crawls the secret out. COF called his set Getting Deeper — each doll a step from the conscious mind down into the unconscious. Pier & Mag of LADUCK CREW turned theirs into five little worlds under glass, one per continent, sized largest to smallest. Dater127 rebuilt the three wise monkeys in his own hand. And Christian Böhmer, who normally paints photorealistic characters, painted nothing at all: five dolls in five human skin tones, one letter each, reading E Q U A L.

The artists came from Argentina, Belgium, England, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Poland, Russia, Spain and Venezuela. Shirts, stickers and accessories were sold alongside the work to fund the show’s onward travel; the plan for 2015 was London, Berlin, Warsaw and Milan.

I painted a set myself. Curating a show you are also in is a good discipline: you find out quickly whether your own work survives being hung next to fifty-nine other people’s.

Custom matryushka design by

COF (Argentina) · BIRD (Belgium) · ELFIN · TIZER ONE (England) · BABY K · DAKOOL KIDS · PAPY TSF (France) · CARL KENZ · CYBIRDS · DATER127 · HAEVIE STYLES · MR. TRASH · PANIK · KASPER · COSTWO K-NIBAL · Kj263 (Germany) · ADI SEMED · AMBI PLAZMA · AONE+ · ALASKA · AVI VAANUNU · BELLA VOLOVNIK · DANIEL DONNER · DESO BFC · DIOZ · GUY PITCHON · NESCA SMD · PILPELED · JUNAM · MAS972 · NASTIA ZLOTIN · WONKY MONKY · NOWIS · LARS · ROSS PLAZMA · SWAN · TAL HARADA · TOM MELNICK · TIPAGRAFFIC · NOA ALON · YUTA · YINON ZINGER · UNTAY · VISION TATTOO · KIPOD TATTOO · MICHA FISHMAN · SHELL · SHIZ (Israel) · LADUCK · MR. BLOB · MAX GATTO · REPTO · SMAKE · SHINE ROYAL (Italy) · CEKAS · HOOK (Poland) · KREAL (Russia) · DEMIACONCEPT (Spain) · ALIEN · KOZ DOS (Venezuela) — and more.

Coverage

Objects

Art toys

Blank vinyl and resin figures, hand-painted one at a time. The house palette is black and white, thrown and splattered rather than brushed, with a yellow eye that does most of the work. Bears, rabbits, a bull terrier, a skate deck — the shape is somebody else’s, everything on it is mine.

They started as studio exercises: a wall gives you a day and a crowd, a twenty-centimetre figure gives you an afternoon and a shelf. Painting characters small taught me things about them I did not learn painting them three metres tall.

Product & industrial design

Objects, not products

Three design studies. Each began with a problem worth solving and stopped at the point where the idea is clear. They are prototypes and concept work — nothing here is in production, and the engineering is deliberately left off the wall.

True Pulse

Recovery you carry in your own bag. The devices that actually help a body recover after training tend to live in clinics and physiotherapy rooms; the idea was to put that in the hands of the person doing the training, in an object that reads as sports equipment rather than medical equipment.

Airfloat

A seat for people who sit through pain. Relief cushions solve one problem and create two more: they look like something from a hospital, and they trap heat. The study asked what the same object looks like if it breathes, and if you would not mind being seen sitting on it.

Past / Future Simplicity

A carved clock-lantern — angels, exposed gearing, hanging lamps. An object that behaves like a fragment of a cathedral and lights a living room, studied on its own and then placed through interiors from pale and minimal to dark and heavy.

Animation & worlds

Bel Air Social Club

An adult animated comedy created with Eric Loch. Eight episodes written, a finished 17-minute pilot, a 63-page comic adaptation, a four-game browser arcade and a full merchandise line. The voice cast was designed by the creators and generated with AI.

Trailer ▸Site ▸

Outback Mayhem

An animated series in development. Character bibles, turnarounds, model sheets and props for a full ensemble — Steve, Joey, Chip, Ellie, Tina, Professor Oz, Sam — each specified down to height, wardrobe and behaviour.

Rat City

A generative-AI video comic with a developed world and cast — neon-lit, dystopian, scored with its own soundtrack. Around 270 stills and 87 animation clips.

Documentary

Home is where….

A photographic series made at night on the streets of Tel Aviv. Doorways, benches, bank lobbies, a green wall. Participants were paid.

Concepts & ventures

Mushroom Hunt

Solar-powered interactive light-and-sound installations that turn public gardens into playable space. Taken to investors and to grant application, with defined game modes.

Live ▸

Storyteller Inc

A platform combining generative AI with VR and AR to build living narrative worlds in real time — turning a prompt into somewhere you can stand.

Live ▸

EZXS Gallery

Founded, curated and ran an independent gallery for contemporary art and street culture, 2017–2018.

Massive Wear

An independent clothing label joining graffiti, urban identity and commercial visual language.

Chip! — Companion AI Device

A product concept for an interactive desk companion combining personality, communication and security.

Bamba Baby

A concept for a large-scale exhibition bringing street artists together with sculptural objects.

App & product

Doggy Style

A location-based social app for dog owners — dog profiles, playdate matching, nearby parks, events and premium tiers. Designed end to end: onboarding, matching, maps, settings and paywall, alongside a full business case with funding allocation, revenue projections, market sizing and a competitor matrix.

Moving image

Video

Music videos built with generative tools, and documentation of the walls being painted. Full-length versions live on YouTube.

Music videos

Four films, written and produced by MAS972, the visuals generated with AI. They play here in full.

Ring My Bell1:37 · music video · visuals generated with AI
That’s All Folks2:07 · music video · visuals generated with AI
Desert Party1:01 · music video · visuals generated with AI
אתה שולח לי הודעה — You Send Me a Message2:03 · music video · visuals generated with AI

Graffiti on film

Bel Air Social Club

Music

MAS972

DJ sets and original productions since 2022. Everything below is mine, written and produced, and it plays here in full — forty-two tracks, no sign-up, no other company’s logo on it.

The first seventeen are the MAS972 Hard Set in the order I actually play it: build, peak, burn. Camelot key in the right-hand column, so anyone who mixes can see why one track follows another.

  1. BUILD
  2. 01Techno Nation 18B
  3. 02Cops Acid4B
  4. 03Party 1286A
  5. 04Party (Hard Techno)1A
  6. PEAK
  7. 05MF Gabber1B
  8. 06MF Gabber 21A
  9. 07MF Gabber 41A
  10. 08Jokes On You (Dark Gabber)2B
  11. 09Give You In The Head2B
  12. 10Rage Destroy2A
  13. 11Saca Ra Ca Sa5B
  14. 12Saca Gabber Dark5A
  15. 13Stone Age Wins5A
  16. 14Metro Breakcore4A
  17. 15Grind Explode6A
  18. BURN
  19. 16Jokes On You (Hardstyle)11A
  20. 17Conga Hardstyle10B

Extended pool

Swaps and extensions, grouped by key family. Same set, different night.

  1. 18That’s All Folks1A
  2. 19Party1B
  3. 20Gives In The Head1A
  4. 21Static Gospel2B
  5. 22Metro2A
  6. 23Cops Electro Trip4B
  7. 24100 Errors4B
  8. 25Ring My Bell 1115A
  9. 26Ring My Bell 2225B
  10. 27Stone Age 15A
  11. 28To End It Trump5B
  12. 29Trump That’s All Folks6A
  13. 30Day N Night6A
  14. 31Trump War6A
  15. 32Rumor Has It6A
  16. 33Jokes On You (Bounce Drop)6A
  17. 34Party Big6A
  18. 35Vending Thunder6A
  19. 36Techno Nation7A
  20. 37Conga10A
  21. 38MF Gabber 310B
  22. 39Trump War 111A
  23. 40Spoonrave10A
  24. 41Techno Nation 23A
  25. 42Factory Engines—

Generative work

A body of generative music — including Strong Man Weed, one track rebuilt through roughly thirty genre and language variants, from gabber and hardstyle to ska, western and Arabic.

Four of the tracks have films: watch the music videos ▸

CV

Selected exhibitions & events

  • PAINT N' BEERTel Aviv2013
  • BABUSHKA SHOWGroup exhibition2014–present
  • EZXS GALLERYTel Aviv2017–2018
  • The 7th Floor Graffiti ExpoCentral Bus Station, Tel Aviv2013
  • MOS: Meeting of StylesPoland · Germany · Greece2012–2014
  • Artists 4 Israel2013–2015
  • South Wind Festival2013–2016
  • The Streets Are TalkingHolon Children's Museum2015
  • UpFestBristol, England2016, 2017
  • Pop Up MuseumTel Aviv2019
  • Loop Colors Graffiti JamIsrael2021
  • Petach Tikva Market Project2022
  • MisturaItaly

Tools

MidjourneyRunwayElevenLabsLumaViduVozoVeo3ProcreateAbleton

Also

Curator of urban art exhibitions. Gallery-selling artist. Commissioned murals across Israel and Europe. Founder of MAS Graffiti School, 2001.

Press

Selected coverage

The copyright ruling

Profiles & features

Reference & collections

Pages & profiles

For press & galleries

Press kit

Everything needed to write about or exhibit the work: biography, the copyright ruling, and print-resolution photography. No permission request necessary for the images below — the licences are already open. Credit as stated.

The short version

MAS972 is Yonatan Kochva, a multidisciplinary artist working between street art, design, technology and urban culture. Painting walls since 2001 and the first in Israel to build structured graffiti workshops. Commissioned murals across Israel and Europe, a curator of urban art exhibitions, and a gallery-selling artist. In December 2024 he won the case that established street art as copyright-protected work under Israeli law.

The ruling, in one paragraph

Kochva & Tabak v. Dahan Peretz, C.C. 39402-10-19, Tel Aviv-Yafo Magistrate’s Court, judgment 9 December 2024, Hon. Judge Ron Goldstein. Filed 2019. The court held that street art is entitled to the same copyright protection as any other artwork, including in public space, and found infringement of both the economic and moral right. ₪75,000 to Yonatan Kochva, ₪55,000 to the widow of the late Damian Tabak, plus ₪32,500 in costs and fees. Counsel: Tony Greenman and Omer Halevi.

Print-resolution images

Each link opens the original file. Up to 20 megapixels — large enough for full-page print.

Full archive ▸Wikidata ▸

Credit lines

Artwork: MAS972 (Yonatan Kochva). Photography as listed against each file — Nizzan Cohen, Bukvoed, Ovedc, Yaffa Phillips, Israel Preker / PikiWiki — under the Creative Commons licence shown. Both credits are required: the mural and the photograph are separate works with separate authors.

Contact

massivewear@gmail.com

+972 54 749 2111 · Tel Aviv, Israel

Contact

Let's make something.

massivewear@gmail.com

+972 54 749 2111

Tel Aviv, Israel

Social

Projects online

© Yonatan Kochva / MAS972. Reproduction without permission is not permitted — a principle established in court.

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