Lea Nikel (born Nikelsberg) was a Ukrainian-born artist who emigrated with her parents to Palestine in 1920, and grew up in Tel Aviv. Nikel began to study painting in her mid-teens with several influential avant-garde Israeli artists. She continued her education in Paris, where she lived and worked from 1950 to 1961. Nikel drew inspiration from the artistic atmosphere of Paris, consistently exploring a vibrant aesthetic. She also lived in New York and Rome. In 1977, she returned to Israel. Nikel’s lyrical abstract paintings were exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1964 and at a career retrospective at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art in 1995. That same year, Nikel received the Israel Prize for painting, and in 1997, she was named a Chevalier of Arts and Letters by the French minister of culture.
In the late 1970s, after a period in which he painted only in black and white, Held began using bright colors in his paintings of hard-edged geometric shapes, enabling him to explore space, volume…
These hollow, spool-shaped terra-cotta objects from Beth Shemesh would hold one or more pellets (often small pebbles) that when shaken would produce a sound. They have been considered babies’ toys…