Jacob Wexler

Jacob Wexler was born in 1912 in Liepāja

Wexler was born in 1912 in Liepāja, Latvia, to parents who belonged to the Jewish Labour Bund. His father Tuvia was an accountant and his mother Sonia was a seamstress. In 1923 the family moved to Hamburg, Germany, where the children went to Jewish schools.

In 1930, against his father's wishes, he began studying art in Hamburg, where he encountered German Expressionism. After the Nazis rose to power, he had to leave his studies in 1933. He married Annie Roch in 1935, and that summer the couple settled at Kibbutz Ein HaHoresh in Palestine.

The couple later moved to Haifa, where Wexler befriended local painters and took part in group shows. A 1943 visit to Yemin Moshe in Jerusalem marked a turning point in his work. He joined the Israel Painters and Sculptors Association in 1944 and held his first solo show in the country in 1946 in Jerusalem.

In 1948 he was drafted into the IDF, and a solo show of his work opened at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art that May. In 1950 he moved to Tel Aviv and met Miriam Sternberg, the mother of his children. He later directed the Avni Institute of Art in Tel Aviv. He died in 1995.