Jacob Gildor

Jacob Gildor was born in 1948 in Feuchtwangen

Gildor was born Jacob-Yosef Gildengorn in Feuchtwangen, Germany, to two Holocaust survivors. In 1948 the family moved to Israel and settled in Holon, and his teacher changed his surname to Gildor. He began drawing in 1962 at the family café in Tel Aviv, sketching Jaffa and its people.

In 1965 he was accepted to Bezalel but chose to study law at Tel Aviv University, finishing in 1971. During his studies he served as an airborne combat medic in Unit 669. He then worked as a lawyer at the Hasneh company for 14 years before leaving to devote himself to art.

In 1972 he studied traditional oil and tempera painting in Austria with Ernst Fuchs, who introduced him to Surrealism. In 1980 he co-founded the Meshushe group, which sought to bring Surrealist art into the Israeli art scene. He spent 1987 at the Cité des Arts in Paris and exhibited in Israel, Sweden, Germany and France.

From 1993 the Holocaust became a theme in his work. In 2009 the Museum of Israeli Art in Ramat Gan held his retrospective "Segments of Creation", with a 3 part monograph. He advises Montefiore Auction House in Tel Aviv and MacDougall's in London, and in December 2024 received a prize from the Museum Moshe Castel.