Yechiel Shemi

Yechiel Shemi was born in 1922 in Warsaw

Shemi was born Yechiel Stizberg in Warsaw in 1922 to Moshe and Esther Stizberg. When he was two months old, the family moved to Mandate Palestine and settled in Haifa. He attended the Reali School in Haifa, joined a youth movement and studied painting with Paul Henich.

He was among the founders of Kibbutz Beit HaArava north of the Dead Sea, where he farmed and made landscape art before turning to sculpture. In 1942 he worked for about 3 months in the studio of sculptor Yitzhak Danziger in Tel Aviv. In 1945 he took the name Shemi and became an envoy of the HeHalutz movement, studying with Chaim Gross in New York.

Beit HaArava was abandoned during the War of Independence, and the works he left there were lost. In 1949 he joined Kibbutz Kabri in the Galilee and served as its secretary from 1950 to 1952. In 1952 he joined the New Horizons group.

In the mid-1950s he moved from wood and stone to metal, and from 1962 he made works from scrap metal. He studied in Paris from 1959 to 1961 and later taught at Oranim, the Technion and Ein Hod. The Museum of Modern Art in New York bought his work, the first purchase there of work by an Israeli artist.

His work was shown in solo exhibitions in Brussels, Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, and a retrospective was held at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art in 1997. He died on October 31, 2003.