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Wolf Kibel (1903-1938)

Wolf Kibel was born on the sixteenth of December, 1903, in Grodzisk, Poland into a traditionally Jewish family. His father, who was a musician and artist himself, died when Kibel was eight, leaving his family in poverty, a fate that Kibel would not in his lifetime escape. The artist's spirit, however, remained optimistic, and he strove throughout his life to paint with truth, inquisitivity, and inspiration. The result was a body of work dominated by a certain personal quality of highly complex and skilled style.

Kibel's only formal education took place at the Cheddar school, a traditionally Jewish institution that taught only Hebrew and the classic texts of the Talmud. At the outbreak of the First World War, Kibel and his family relocated to Warsaw, where Kibel apprenticed to a bookbinder and, on his delivery routes, discovered his love for painting in the windows of the local galleries. From this point on, Kibel was determined to become an artist, and practiced drawing and painting whenever he could afford materials. As a teenager, he was commissioned to paint a Warsaw synagogue. Through this commission, the young artist was able to meet several Polish artists, all who admired Kibel's work.

At age twenty, Kibel left Poland and emigrated to Czeckslovakia and Poland, each time narrowly escaping Russian. Once in Vienna, Kibel was exposed to the Impressionists and the Cubists. After relocating once again, this time to Tel Aviv, the artist discovered Matisse, whose style for some time would influence him greatly. Kibel's favorite artist, however, was Chagall.

During all his travels, Kibel experienced extreme poverty and slept for the most part on beaches and in public spaces. Still, he managed to continue working, developing a complex but simple style that steered clear of the picturesque and embraced the unusual, the modern, and the individuality of expression. After marrying Freda Kibel, the artist moved to Cape Town, South Africa, where he would live and work for the remainder of his life.

Kibel's first exhibition took place in Cape Town in 1931. By this time, his media had expanded from charcoal to oil paint, watercolor, etching, and pastel. Kibel and a fellow artist, Lippy Lipschitz, decided to open a small school in Cape Town called Palm Studios that taught young artists to hone their technical skills while still retaining individual style. In the meantime, Kibel's work achieved a high sense of organization, often using distortion to bring out the personality of the sitter. He created compositions dominated by triangles, rectangles, and curvilinear forms.

Wolf Kibel's last exhibition took place in Cape Town in July, 1937. Ten months later, he died of tuberculosis, leaving behind a wealth of paintings, etchings and drawings that are powerfully simple, manifesting distinct moods and atmospheres and extracting the absolute maximum amount of expression from the absolute minimum of material.

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