Works

Lekar trained as an architect in Kharkiv. His earliest surviving works are precise watercolor studies of old churches and fortresses in Novgorod and the Russian North (1954). They were followed in 1963 by a series of temperas: Kizhi, the Solovki fortress, Armenian churches, all reduced to flat, luminous planes of color.

In the mountains of Dagestan and Armenia he painted villages as architecture: stacked masses of stone and clay, minarets and churches set against the hills. Already here, in works such as Light Among the Trees, light begins to come from inside the picture.

Still lifes in which a kettle, a glass or a fork become exercises in form, and a painting of pure solids: sphere, column, cone and cube, the basic vocabulary of an architect.

Decorative temperas of old Russian churches, and a 1989 series of St Petersburg canals and spires, painted on the eve of his emigration.

In his oils, light does not fall on things. It comes out of them: Sabbath candles, a reclining figure, a fountain. The Kyiv critic Miron Petrovsky wrote that in his portraits of figures such as Mozart “you see an aureole rather than a figure.”

After arriving in Israel he painted ancient objects as if lit from inside a museum case, sometimes with a museum label: “Fish-shaped vessels, Canaanite period.” In the words of the critic Grigory Ostrovsky, Lekar “actualizes archaeology.”

The first years in Israel brought saturated color (the Jaffa lighthouse, a watermelon), then the desert. In Mitzpe Ramon the crater and the dunes dissolve into warm, almost monochrome light. A plastic relief shows another side of a multidisciplinary artist.

Large watercolors in which light itself becomes the subject: an apple glowing in a box, “Experiment No. 101,” the cucumber and the potato as relics, elephants beneath fruits that shine like suns. They are witty and strange, and painted with great control.

Arches, passages and tunnels beneath the Old City, with small figures moving towards the light. Tunnel Road (2006) brings the same vision to a modern Jerusalem road tunnel.

From free, wet-on-wet watercolors of the 1980s to the refined winter rivers, golden mountains and the Himalaya of his last years.

A satirical series painted in Paris. Shop windows framed like shrines advertise “Soldes”, and sacred symbols, famous names and slogans are offered for sale side by side. The provocations are deliberate: the series is a commentary on a culture in which everything, faith, history and ideology included, becomes merchandise.

Painted during his residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts. The monuments of Paris (the Opéra, the Vendôme and July columns, the Arc de Triomphe, a gargoyle of Notre-Dame) appear through a veil of mist and late light.

Among his last works: beams, corridors and gardens of light, painted on paper and, at large scale, on silk.