Yosl Bergner (1920-2017) – "An Angel for Shmulik Segal on His 70th Birthday" – Mixed Media on Paper

Yosl Bergner (1920-2017) – "An Angel for Shmulik Segal on His 70th Birthday" – Mixed Media on Paper
Yosl Bergner (1920-2017), "An Angel for 70-year-old Shmulikl" (Yiddish).
Mixed media on paper. Titled and inscribed to Shmulik Segal (Yiddish), signed and dated 1994.
31X36 cm. Good condition. Framed; unexamined out of frame.
Provenance: The estate of Shmulik Segal.
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Yosl Bergner (1920-2017) was born in Vienna. His parents, singer Fanya Bergner and poet Melech Ravitch, were active in various cultural and intellectual circles, nurturing his creativity from a young age. In his youth he studied painting with artist Hirsch Altman in Warsaw, and at the age of seventeen immigrated with his sister to Australia, where he studied at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School in Melbourne. During World War II, he served in the Australian Army. After the war, he married artist and writer Audrey Bergner, and in 1950 the two immigrated to Israel. Bergner first settled in Safed, later moving to Tel-Aviv, where he lived and worked until his death at the age of 97.
Bergner was a prolific artist, working in various fields – painting, book illustration and scenic and costume design. His multifaceted work, at times somber and at times bright, is inspired by surrealism and symbolism. Art critic Dr. Gideon Ofrat, in a tribute to Bergner published in the Erev Rav journal (January 2017), writes: "Ever since the paintings he made in the 1940s after the stories of Y.L. Peretz, Bergner never ceased telling us stories with his paintings. The stories of the Jewish sage, whose one eye is laughing while the other is weeping. Bergner never stopped telling the stories of the exiles, the expelled, the refugees, the seekers of the shore of Redemption […] Bergner repeatedly declared in his paintings: for the exiled wanderers – these furniture, kitchen utensils, lanterns, etc. – there is no safe haven; any safe haven is nothing but an existential illusion. And thus, in an endless desert […] and under the bleak sky, Bergner sentences humankinds – Jews and non-Jews alike – to what Y.H. Brenner calls 'exile everywhere' and 'an existence of thorns'" (Hebrew).