Lea Nikel

The recorded working language is Hebrew. The field of work recorded is painting. Work by Lea Nikel is recorded in the collections of Bar-David Museum of Art and Judaica, Mane-Katz Museum, Israel Museum and Brandes Family Collection, Tel Aviv. Distinctions recorded are Israel Prize, Dizengoff Prize, honorary doctorate of the Weizmann Institute of Science and Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres.

Lea Nikel (Lea Nikelsberg) was born in Zhitomir, Ukraine, on December 6, 1918. Her family immigrated to Mandatory Palestine in 1920. She had one sister, Sara (Bock), who was born in 1926. She began studying with painter Chaim Gliksberg in Tel Aviv in 1935, later studying with Yechezkel Streichman and Avigdor Stematsky. From 1961 to 1977, Nikel lived in Greenwich Village (one year), Rome (three years) and New York (four years), before returning to Israel in 1977. She was married to Sam Leiman and had one daughter, Ziva Hanan. She lived in Moshav Kidron.

Nikel held her first solo exhibition in 1954 at the Chemerinsky Art Gallery in Tel Aviv and her first solo show in Paris at Galerie Colette Allendy in 1957. She took part in numerous international group exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale in 1964. The Tel Aviv Museum of Art organized a retrospective exhibition of her paintings in 1995. Nikel continued to paint until just a few days before her death on September 10, 2005. In 2023 her work was included in the exhibition Action, Gesture, Paint: Women Artists and Global Abstraction 1940-1970 at the Whitechapel Gallery in London.

Nikel's style was a form of expressionistic abstraction sometimes called lyrical abstraction. She painted with a brusque, generous touch and favored high-keyed colors. She was known for buoyant compositions consisting of rough-edged blocks of color and scribbly, calligraphic lines that together conveyed a sense of imaginative excitement and urgent sensuousness.