Uri Katzenstein

Uri Katzenstein was born in 1951 in Tel Aviv

Uri Katzenstein was born in Tel Aviv in 1951. He was the only child of parents from Germany who came to the country before the Holocaust. As a young man he played music in several rock bands.

He joined the IDF in 1969 and fought in the Yom Kippur War as a medic. In the late 1970s he studied at the San Francisco Art Institute and earned an MFA. He then moved to New York City, where he lived and worked through the 1980s.

His early work mixed performance, music, video and sound art, and was shown at New York venues such as The Kitchen and Danceteria. He later made sculpted figures, objects and sound machines. Back in Israel he created stage shows, took part in the rock opera Samara in 1993 and released an album with Ohad Fishof in 1999.

He represented Israel at the Venice Biennale in 2001 and won first prize at the Buenos Aires Biennale in 2002. His work was shown at museums in Israel, Russia, Germany and the United States. From 2003 he taught fine arts at the University of Haifa.

He died on August 24, 2018, after a stroke, and was buried in Netanya. Exhibitions he had been working on opened after his death in Amsterdam and New York.