Mordecai Ardon

 

 Mordecai Ardon (1896 –1992) was an Israeli painter. Ardon was born Max Bronstein in 1896 in Tuchów, Galicia (then Austria-Hungary, now Poland). In 1933 he emigrated to Jerusalem in Mandate Palestine. He was granted Palestinian citizenship in 1936 and changed his name to Mordecai Ardon.
He participated in the Venice Biennale of 1968.Beginning in the 1950s Ardon adopted a complex system of symbolic images in his paintings, taken from the Jewish Mystical tradition (Kabbalah), from the Bible and from a tangible reality. In his painting "Gates of Light", for example, he expressed "the inner mystery and timelessness of the landscape." His work seeks to impart a cosmic dimension to the present, linking it to antiquity and mystery. The same approach can be found in "At the Gates of Jerusalem" (1967), which shows the attempt to "convey his feelings about the cosmic significance of Israel’s return to the Old City of Jerusalem during the Six-Day War". "Bird near a yellow wall" (1950) demonstrates his simplistic involvement with the Holocaust, a subject to which he was one of the few Israeli artists to devote a phase of his work, at that time.
As a teacher and director of the "New Bezalel", Ardon conveyed his sense of social involvement, his tendency towards Jewish mysticism and local mythology, and the combination of personal national symbols with reality-always stressing masterful technique../wikiart.org/

 

Yehezkel Streichman - Israeli Abstract Painting

Yehezkel Streichman (1906 – 1993) was an Israeli painter.He is considered a pioneer of Israeli modernist painting. Among the awards that he won were the Dizengoff Prize and the Israel Prize.
Yehezkal Streichman was born in Kovno, Lithuania in 1906. Streichman emigrated to Palestine to begin his art education at the influential Bezalel Academy of Art and Design. There he would study art and architecture, and continue his studies in Paris and Florence.
His painting style involved using successive thick layers of paint.He was an acclaimed painter in what was known as the modernist "New Horizons" (Ofakim Hadashim) group in 1950s Tel Aviv, which he founded in 1948 along with Joseph Zaritsky and Stematsky.It painted in a French "lyrical abstraction" style
Yehezkal Streichman taught art throughout his life, starting in the Kibbutz’s in the 1930s and 40s, and then at the Avni Institute in Tel Aviv until 1979.

Yechiel Shemi - Abstract Painting and Sculpture

Yechiel Shemi ‎(1922-2003) was an Israeli sculptor. His environmental sculptures are displayed in open spaces around the country.In 1959-1961, Yechiel Shemi studied art in Paris. In 1977-1979, he taught sculpting and lectured on environmental sculpture at Oranim Teachers College. He also taught at the Technion in Haifa and the Ein Hod artist's colony. Shemi was a member of New Horizons group.After a show in the United States in the 1960s, the Museum of Modern Art acquired his work. Shemi was the first Israeli artist to have his work purchased by the MoMa.Shemi won the Sandberg Prize in 1981 and the Israel Prize for sculpture in 1986. In 1966 and 1997, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art mounted exhibitions of his work

In 1962 Shemi began to create expressive works. The raw material used in these sculpture was mostly scrap metal. During the 1960s Yehiel Shemi introduced his assemblage sculpture in the solo exhibitions at Centre for Fine Arts, Brussels in 1964. Yehiel Shemi had additional solo exhibitions at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art in 1966 and at the Israel Museum in 1967. Shemi also created at this time two large public statues. In 1966 Shemi moved to Kibbutz Gadot for a half year.

In the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s Shemi changed the technique used in his sculptures. Instead of using ready-made objects, he reduced his art to geometric shapes. In 1981 Shemi was awarded the Sandberg Prize from the Israel Museum. In 1986, the Israel Prize for sculpture, together with Batya Lishansky. In 1988 Adam Baruch published the book "Yehiel Shemi: Sculptures" and a solo exhibit was help in the Ramat Gan Museum of Art.Wikipedia

Lyrical Abstraction Lea Nikel

Lea Nikel ( born 1918, died 2005) was an Israeli abstract artist.
Lea Nikel (Lea Nikelsberg) was born in Zhitomir, Ukraine, in 1918. Her family immigrated to British-administered Palestine in 1920. She had one sister, Sara (Bock), who was born in 1926. She began studying with painter Chaim Gliksberg in Tel Aviv in 1935, later studying with Yechezkel Streichman and Avigdor Stematsky. From 1961 to 1977, Nikel lived in Greenwich Village (one year), Rome (three years) and New York (four years), before returning to Israel in 1977. She was married to Sam Leiman and had one daughter, Ziva Hanan. She lived in Moshav Kidron.Nikel held her first solo exhibition at Chemerinsky Art Gallery in Tel Aviv and her first solo show in Paris at Galerie Colette Allendy in 1957. She took part in numerous international group exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale in 1964. The Tel Aviv Museum of Art organized a retrospective exhibition of her paintings in 2005. Nikel continued to paint until just a few days before her death in September 2005.Nikel's style was a form of expressionistic abstraction sometimes called lyrical abstraction. She painted with a brusque, generous touch and favored high-keyed colors. She was known for buoyant compositions consisting of rough-edged blocks of color and scribbly, calligraphic lines that together conveyed a sense of imaginative excitement and urgent sensuousness.Wikipedia