Art and designצבי מלנוביצר

Zvi Malnovitzer

Zvi Malnovitzer is an Israeli expressionist painter from a Haredi family in Bnei Brak, known for portraits that join religious and secular themes.

born 1945Expressionist portrait paintingBlending religious and secular themesPaintings on Holocaust and exile

Occupation: painter
Education: Avni Institute of Art and Design

Zvi Malnovitzer was born in 1945 in Bnei Brak

Malnovitzer was born in 1945 in Bnei Brak, the only son of a Gur Hasidic family. His father came from Poland and his mother from Germany. He attended cheder and devoted his youth to Talmudic study.

He began painting as a child, using old bed sheets and wood scraps. At 13 his neighbor, the painter Yehuda Wallersteiner, became his teacher. At 12 he drew a black ink work on exile and the Holocaust, in which members of his family died.

He was drafted into the IDF in 1963. In 1966 he married Bilha and worked in a carpentry shop in south Tel Aviv, where local vendors, beggars and drug addicts became subjects of his paintings.

In 1977 he studied briefly at the Avni Institute in Tel Aviv. In Europe he studied works by Rembrandt and Goya, and in Reichenau, near Vienna, he attended seminars with Ernst Fuchs. His subjects include rabbis, Holocaust survivors and coffee shop patrons, and his works have been shown in cities such as Tel Aviv, Tokyo, Paris and New York.