Lea Nikel

Lea Nikel
Photograph of Lea Nikel, 1979 Photographer: Stanley I. Batkin
Born	1918 Zhitomir, Ukraine
Died	2005 (aged 86–87)
Nationality	Israeli, Jewish
Known for	Painting
Movement	Israeli art

Lea Nikel (Hebrew: לאה ניקל‎‎; born 1918, died 2005) was an Israeli abstract artist.

Lea Nikel (Lea Nikelsberg) was born in Zhitomir, Ukraine, in 1918. Her family immigrated to British-administered 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 at 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 2005. Nikel continued to paint until just a few days before her death in September 2005.

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.