Michael Kovner

Michael Kovner was born in 1948 in Ein HaHoresh

Michael Kovner was born on May 25, 1948, in Ein HaHoresh. His father was Abba Kovner, a poet, thinker and World War II partisan, and his mother Vitka Kovner was a partisan and psychologist. He was named after his father's brother, who was killed fighting the Nazis with the Soviet partisans.

As a teenager he studied painting with Yohanan Simon at Kibbutz Gan Shmuel, and later at the Avni Institute in Tel Aviv. He served in Sayeret Matkal. After the army he studied painting in New York from 1972 to 1975.

He returned to Israel in 1976 and held his first solo show at the Artists House in Jerusalem. He taught at Bezalel and began working with the Binet Gallery in Tel Aviv in 1978. His work was shown at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, the Israel Museum and the Jewish Museum in New York.

His paintings moved from everyday subjects to landscapes of Jerusalem, Ein HaHoresh, the Gilboa, the Judean Desert and New York. From 2008 to 2013 he worked on the graphic novel "Ezekiel's World," published in 2015 and adapted into a play at the Khan Theater. In 2018 he opened the Maya Gallery in south Tel Aviv with sculptor Avner Levinson.

In 2020 he received the Mordechai Ish-Shalom Lifetime Achievement Award. He is married with 2 children and has lived in the Baka neighborhood of Jerusalem since 1975.