About: Yehezkel Streichman
Yehezkel Streichman was born in Kaunas (Kovno), Lithuania, and studied painting with the Jewish artist Tsasen (Masenblum). In 1924 he immigrated to Israel and studied art at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design. After completing his studies he studied architecture at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts (ENSBA) in Paris and later at the Gallery of the Academy of Florence. In 1936, he returned to Israel and settled in Tel Aviv, where he met Tzilla Hacohen-Wallach with whom he married, and painted often over the years. Streichman was part of the Avni Institute of Art, one of the founders of Hastudia school of painting and one of the founders of Ofakim Hadashim - participating in all of its group exhibitions. Streichman is one of the fathers of the "lyrical abstraction" in Israel, which connected Israeli painting with world trends and with the Paris school in particular. During the 1930s, Streichman mainly painted traditional and figurative themes such as portraits, female nudity, facial expressions and a few paintings of the outdoors. In these paintings his quest for abstraction is already apparent, with brushstrokes that are intense and expressive. Over time, Streichman's paintings became more abstract, and from having one central object, his paintings in the 1950s turned into a fabric of surfaces and paint patches that filled the entire canvas, with lines marked by a brush or a pencil. Streichman's paintings became increasingly abstract by the end of the 1950s, but still maintained a dialogue with the Israeli landscape. However, this period also features figurative portraits from time to time as well. Streichman won the prestigious Dizengoff Prize three times (1944, 1954, 1969) and in 1990 Streichman received the Israel Prize.
