Leonardo Nierman

However, his musical training has been a major influence on his painting and sculpture, reproducing movement and harmony as Nierman sees similarities between the two disciplines.

[1][2] He was the only child of Lithuanian Jewish parents Clara Mendelejis, a bakery worker and Chanel Nierman, a bus inspector who later started a small jacket factory.

He gave up the violin when he heard a recording of himself playing Symphonie espagnole by Édouard Lalo, and then comparing his interpretation with that of Yehudi Menuhin.

[1] At first, he thought he had wasted his time with the violin but had since decided that it gave him his philosophy on life and prepared him for his painting and sculpture.

[1][2] He completed a bachelor's in business administration at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México but never pursued this career because he had begun to paint, including a mural at his school.

[1][2] Nierman had been painting for a while when Raquel Tibol invited him to exhibit his work at the Centro de Deportes Israeli in Mexico City.

[8] His work can be found in museums and public buildings in Australia, Austria, Colombia, Costa Rica, the United States, Spain, Israel, Japan, Mexico, Monaco, Panama, Sweden and Thailand.

[12] In 1969 he painted a mural for the physics department at Princeton as well as designed the stained glass windows for Temple Beth Israel in Lomas de Chapultepec.

[2][5] These include the Flame of the Millennium commissioned by Howard C. Alper, which is at the Ohio Street interchange of the Kennedy Expressway in Chicago, Eternal Light at the Outpatient Care Center of the University of Illinois Medical Center in Chicago and Sensación de Vuelo at the Lambert-St. Louis International Airport.

[16] His artistic production includes painting, tapestry design, sculpture, murals, engraving and glass work.

[5] His first artwork was done in the 1950s, influenced by the work of Kandinsky, Klee, Miró and Chirico, as well as the abstract, cubist and surrealist movements.

[2] However, much of his later work had been shaped by his interpretation of nature and a search for the relationship between abstract art and the cosmos, spurred by his studies of color and movement in the 1950s.

[17] In his painting, he preferred to work with clean pigments as the mixing of colors tend to dull the effect of light.

[12] Nierman has said: Painting is to me the aperture through which it is possible to enter a certain world; in it the viewer may find an endless number of magic images, objects, remembrances, associations, fears, joys, hopes and dreams.