Biography

Boris Lekar was born in 1932 in Kharkiv, then in the Soviet Union, now in Ukraine. Between 1950 and 1956 he studied architecture and painting in Kharkiv, and in 1959 he moved to Kyiv, where he lived and worked for three decades.

In Kyiv he worked across architecture, monumental art, sculpture, drawing and painting, including the conservation and design of monuments. In 1983 he received a doctorate in architecture. Alongside his professional work he painted constantly: watercolor studies of old churches and fortresses, the temperas of the Russian North, Armenia and Dagestan, and series of Kyiv landscapes in which, as the critic Miron Petrovsky recalled, color was reduced so far that “ten steps away it seemed like the papers are blank.”

In 1990 he emigrated to Israel and settled in Gilo, Jerusalem. Israel’s light and landscape transformed his work: the desert of Mitzpe Ramon, the sea, the antiquities of the land, the tunnels beneath Jerusalem. Because the heat made long plein-air sessions impossible, he made brief sketches outdoors and painted large watercolors at home, from memory. Some of them, the Eternity series, are watercolors on canvas more than two meters wide.

He was commissioned by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem to document old synagogues in several countries, including India and Turkey. In 2004–2005 he lived and worked in Paris on a residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts.

His work was shown in solo and group exhibitions in Israel, Cyprus, the United States, Ukraine and France, including the Israel Museum, the Museum of Art Ein Harod, the Knesset and the Jerusalem Artists’ House. The Israel Museum acquired his work for its collection. He is regarded by critics as one of the outstanding artists of the Soviet immigration to Israel.

For many years he also hosted exhibitions of other artists in his own home in Gilo, creating a lively community of immigrant artists in Jerusalem. Boris Lekar died in Jerusalem on 30 October 2010.