The impetus for the renovation project was to provide better circulation through the many modernist buildings dotting the campus—which had grown from 50,000 to 500,000 square feet of built space since the museum opened in 1965—and offer visitors a more logical route through its three major collection wings devoted to the archeology of the region, Jewish culture, and fine arts. In a way, the three artists turned that linear coherence upside down by pulling works from different time periods, geographies, and media and using them to support narratives formed from their own associations. This is underscored by having no labels in the galleries next to the art, leading viewers to approach the objects unfiltered and look at each room more as a whole (maps with captions are provided outside the exhibition, which are informative but encumbering). Yet the shows ultimately reinforce the interconnectedness of world cultures—one of the fundamental messages of the Israel Museum which houses everything from the Dead Sea Scrolls to art of the present, in a city where the crossroads of history and cultures play such an immediate role in contemporary life. This message is embodied in the new monumental stainless steel sculpture by Anish Kapoor commissioned as part of the campus renewal for the highest point of the museum’s outdoor promenade. Shaped like an hourglass, the sculpture inverts the reflection of the Jerusalem skyline, which starts at the tapered center of the piece and levitates to the top as the viewer approaches. It’s a lovely metaphor for the sands of time not running out but continually filling to the brim.

Susan Hiller, a U.S.-born, London-based multidisciplinary artist, hewed closest to standard curatorial practice by drawing 34 works from one timeframe—modern and contemporary—but created a more dense and visceral installation than typically encountered at a museum. Depending on the day viewers come, they’re greeted by either a brilliant burst of 2000 red gerberas pressed behind three large panels of glass or else the flowers in some form of rot and stench in the piece “Preserve Beauty” (1991) by Anya Gallacio. It’s tapestry-like visual effect and themes of life and death, memory and loss, are echoed in Christian Boltanski’s “Reserve (Storeroom) (1989), a long wall hung ceiling-to-floor with limp used clothing. Two floor pieces carpeting large areas—Erez Israeli’s “Field of Flowers” (2005), a bed of artificial red blooms, and Dina Shenhav’s “City” (1997), a charred gray topographical model of architectural ruins—ripple associatively with the others around the ideas of beauty and decay.

Yinka Shonibare, who grew up in Nigeria and is now based in London, selected of more than 200 objects from across time and installed them in dynamic, geometric configurations on four square platforms organized around the elements of earth, wind, fire, and water. Each is punctuated with one of Shonibare’s trademark figures in Victorian-era clothes made from African fabrics that personify the four elements and were made especially for the show. On the “earth” platform, with Shonibare’s dandy that has a globe for a head and looks to be charging out into the world in animated stride, the artist has juxtaposed a contemporary Andres Serrano photograph of a black Christ with an assortment of prehistoric tools, an Egyptian funerary mask, a South African fertility doll, and a color image of an 18^th-century synagogue from Suriname among others, pressing viewers to consider elemental relationships and the cross-pollination between cultures.

While Shonibare’s platforms suggest the idea of a “cabinet of curiosities” using a very modernist-looking installation approach, Zvi Goldstein’s floor-to-ceiling installation of more than 400 objects on antiquated shelving overtly referenced those 16^th- and 17^th-century wonder cabinets of odd and precious items collected by noblemen that preceded the concept of a modern museum. A Romanian artist based in Jerusalem who combines objects with text, Goldstein here crowded commonplace objects he found in the museum’s offices and recesses—including old typewriters, eyeglass cases, a Hoover vacuum cleaner, a urinal not by Duchamp—together with photos by Harold Edgerton, Andre Kertesz, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, designs by Charles and Ray Eames and Le Corbusier, and Japanese screens in a visually dramatic, non-hierarchical presentation. He was inspired by a hallucination he had of being haunted by objects, which he alludes to in 62 poems he wrote about the experience that hang on the walls amidst the shelves of objects. Some poems and items on the shelves are so high up they are impossible to really see or read, akin to the way memories can be tantalizingly out of reach while others remain vivid. Of the three shows, Goldstein’s most successfully transcends the individual objects and becomes an artwork in its own right.

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Will Ryman has transplanted a spectacular urban garden to the gallery floor, abloom with more than 100 mammoth hand-constructed roses in a vibrant palette of pinks and reds. Ranging in height from a couple of feet to seven and clustered in groups like at a crowded cocktail party, the flowers have a strong figural presence. While evocative of , the gray otherworldly creatures that densely populated Ryman’s earlier work, these sculptures feel completely fresh and unexpected in their riot of color, immediately recognizable yet strange in their outsized dimensions. Ryman invites us to step through the looking glass and navigate this immersive landscape from a bug’s eye view.

For indeed, we are not alone in the undergrowth. Ryman plants a meaty black fly on a column like a sore thumb. He tucks aphids, ladybugs, and giant bees amidst the curling and unfurling petals, magnifying nature’s pesty business. He litters the scene as well with man’s throwaway business—stubbed-out cigarette butts, a crumpled Coke can, a half-eaten hotdog, a Trident gum wrapper. It’s the kind of detritus that city dwellers tend to become oblivious to. But here—by flipping the relationship between the flowers and the viewers and blowing up the scale of these items—Ryman puts the evidence of our carelessness squarely in our faces in a bit of social commentary.

Yet Ryman clearly has affection for these contemporary artifacts, lovingly painted in every detail of the logos and reminiscent of the artist’s earlier meticulously wacky recreation of a New York newsstand (echoing Red Grooms’s “Ruckus Manhattan.”) They show his humorous, pop sensibility and his eye for urban detail. A lifelong New Yorker, Ryman has even loosely tiled the floor with his own textured steel squares that clank a bit as viewers move around and mimic the gritty feel of the city underfoot. What’s seems different here is how he applies humble industrial materials—wire mesh, plaster, house paint, metal tubing—to such a voluptuous, organic form as the rose, a universal symbol of beauty and romance as well as treachery with its prickly thorns. As in the films of David Lynch, a seedy underbelly lurks below the rosy landscape.

This defiled Garden of Eden seems an allegory of the city itself, with the roses—which Ryman intentionally leaves rough to underscore their manufacture—taking on an architectural quality as well. If the “new beginning” of the title refers in part to the new direction Ryman is taking here in his work, he may also be suggesting that the glorious city of New York, which has taken such a battering these last few years, is ready for a new day.

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In this unabashedly gorgeous show, Enoc Perez uses the contours of modernist architecture and feminine beauty to explore ideas of longing, nostalgia, optimism and melancholy. These large-scale canvases faithfully reproduce the dynamic forms of utopian buildings such as the Palacio da Justica, Brasilia, and the Nakagin Capsule Tower, Tokyo, or the nude torso of a woman, yet the unnatural palette—by turns high-keyed, brooding, and shimmering—pushes the emotional content and abstraction further than in the artist’s previous paintings.

The San Juan-born, New York-based artist continues to construct his paintings without using a brush. Working from reproductions and photographs he’s taken, Perez makes multiple identical drawings with the aid of a projector and transfers each individual color to canvas via oil stick on the back of the drawings in a process akin to color printing. While this painstaking method of building images layer by layer can produce grainy results, typical of his earlier paintings, here Perez experimented as well with broad swaths of thickly applied pigment.

In “Alma Bank, Georgia,” for instance, the futuristic-looking structure, crowned by two crossing arches, is rendered in a thin, streaky manner evocative of old color photographs from the 1960s. Yet the sky is a vivid, richly textured marigold yellow that seems to be enveloping the flying curves and dark foliage in the background—or is the black landscape eating into the unreal sky? The ravishing image, idealized yet wistful, feels plucked from memory.

The dramatic undulating façade in “Teatro Popular, Niteroi, Brasil” is even more removed from time and place. The pale pinkish-white ribbons of architecture, with a sketchy plaid of brown, blue, purple and yellow defining an indeterminate foreground area, are suspended in murky black space that heightens the pure sculptural voluptuousness of the subject. In another canvas nearby, Perez treats the sensuous architecture of a woman’s torso viewed naked from behind similarly. Her white skin tone, flecked with bits of pink, yellow, blue, purple, red and brown, seems illuminated against the black background. In his boldest move toward abstraction, Perez paints a solid deep purple biomorphic form running up her side from one buttock to the shoulder and down the arm and another purple ovoid shrouding her face peering over her shoulder. In both paintings, he captures the promise—of love, of a better tomorrow embodied in modernist projects—and its slippery unattainability.

The standout of the show is “Pavilion of the Soviet Union, Expo 67,” of an outward-oriented structure built for the future that Perez paints with a melancholic glamour. The glassed-in pavilion glows a fiery yellow that seems to give off heat under its soaring cantilevered roof and is cloaked with a saturated teal sky signaling dusk or the end to happiness. In the foreground reflecting pool, Perez paints an expressionistic tour de force of dazzling color and light, suggesting the artist is loosening the yoke of his painting method and enjoying the application of paint unhinged to representation.

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