Yocheved Weinfeld

Yocheved (Juki) Weinfeld (née Ewa Ernst) was born in 1947 in the Silesian city of Legnica (Poland), and lived in Wroclaw, also in Silesia.

1909) was a prosperous manufacturer of men's shirts in Przemyśl, Poland and her mother, Klara, had just graduated from the local vocational high school.

Klara obtained false documents and, posing as an Aryan, served as a housekeeper for a German SS officer stationed in Poland.

At the age of 16 she was taken on as a student by the prominent Israeli artist and teacher, Raffi Lavie, and before she was 20, her works were being shown alongside her mentor's in exhibitions staged by the avant-garde group 10+.

Reuven Berman wrote in The Jerusalem Post: "… Paintings based on internal stylistic and conceptual contrasts that break down fundamentally into a reasoned, studied, restrained approach on the one hand, and a spontaneous, gestural, painterly approach on the other… But the contrasts are lively and the show as a whole bears evidence of intellectual alertness…" In 1973 following her mother's death and the Yom Kippur War, in an attempt to relinquish her facile drawings, and out of need to express her reaction to the scarred flesh and the scarred society, Weinfeld started experimenting with stitches on paper in lieu of pencil lines, and sometimes next to them.

In 1974, in a one-woman show at the Debel Gallery in Jerusalem, Weinfeld – again interested in paradox – exhibited, among other works, a series of photographs of stitched hands and faces.

In 1976, after reading the Code of Jewish Law (Shulhan Arukh), texts which she found fascinating and evocative, Weinfeld created a performance as part of her exhibition at the Debel Gallery.

During the performance the artist explored visual, mythical images of prohibitions and rituals related to cleanliness and mourning, prompted by those texts.

In his article about the exhibition in Art News, ("Whimsey and poetry; traumas and taboos" September, 1976), Meir Ronnen wrote: "One left the gallery questioning many aspects of our Judeo-Christian cultural heritage – a heritage of pain, suffering, superstition and a mystic belief in man's ability to rise above the physical in purification rites."

In her one-person show at the Israel Museum she exhibited ten large complex works, each based on a childhood memory represented by a text.

Stephanie Rachum, the exhibition's curator wrote in the catalogue: "The deliberate disregard for the aesthetic aspect coupled with the stress on the ideational process which exist in Weinfeld's work is part of her Conceptual art background.