Lea Nikel

Lea Nikel, real name Lea Nikelsberg, was born in Zhitomir, Ukraine, in 1918, into a religious family. In 1920, his family emigrated to Palestine, then under British mandate, following the succession of anti-Semitic pogroms in Ukraine1. She has a sister, Sara (Bock), who was born in 1926. She began to study painting with Chaim Gliksberg, in Tel Aviv in 1935.

She gets married and has a daughter. In 1946, separated from her husband, she continued her apprenticeship in painting with Yechezkel Streichman and Avigdor Stematsky, founders with Yosef Zaritsky of an abstraction group, New Horizons, which wanted to free Israeli painting from its regional character, from its provincialism, and introduce it into the circle of contemporary Western art1. She stayed in France in the 1950s and early 1960s. She worked there with painters from the School of Paris, including Pinchus Kremegne, and settled for a time in the artists’ city of La Ruche, in the 15th arrondissement 1. From 1961 to 1977, she settled successively in Greenwich Village in Rome in New York, and in Japan, before returning to Israel. She marries Sam Leiman and has a second daughter. She settles in a moshav, in Kidron in Shephelah.

Her first solo exhibition was at the Chemerinsky gallery in Tel Aviv in 1954, then at the Colette Allendy gallery in Paris in 1957. She participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale in 1964. The art museum of Tel Aviv devoted a retrospective to him in 1995 and 2005