Lea Nikel

Lea Nikel was born in 1918 in Zhytomyr

Lea Nikel was born in Zhytomyr, Ukraine, on December 6, 1918. Her family moved to Mandatory Palestine in 1920, and she grew up in Tel Aviv. She had one sister, Sara.

In 1935 she began studying painting with Chaim Gliksberg in Tel Aviv. In the early 1940s she married and had a daughter, Ziva. In 1946, after separating from her husband, she joined the studio of Yechezkel Streichman and Avigdor Stematsky.

In 1950 she moved to Paris and stayed there until 1961. There her work turned toward Tachisme, a style built on flowing and splashed paint. Her paintings used strong colors, large formats, finger painting, dripping and scribbling.

She held her first solo show in Tel Aviv in 1954 and in Paris in 1957. She later lived in New York and Rome, and represented Israel at the 1964 Venice Biennale. She returned to Israel in 1977.

In 1985 she settled in Moshav Kidron, where her daughter lived. The Tel Aviv Museum of Art held a retrospective of her work in 1995. She painted until shortly before her death from cancer on September 10, 2005, and was buried in Kidron.