Ten Plagues, 1982-3
Shlomo Katz was born into a Jewish family in Łódź, Poland in 1937 and immigrated to Palestine in 1945 at the age of eight. He was educated in Kibbutz Mishmar Ha`emek and displayed an early talent for drawing, later training at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. During the 1970s he exhibited widely in the USA and Canada and, inspired by both medieval icons and oriental miniatures, developed an original technique in which he applied oil paint onto a gilded metal surface, as can be seen in the nine paintings he created for his Falcon Foundation commission for the US Air Force Cadet Chapel in Colorado Springs in 1985. He also translated this technique into the graphic form using metallic inks to create serigraph prints, producing several limited-edition portfolios on religious subjects including the Passover Portfolio (1982-83). Shlomo Katz died in March 1992 in Tel Aviv, Israel. His work is in numerous public collections all around the world including The Wolfson Museum of Judaica, Jerusalem; The Australian National Gallery, Canberra; Museum of Jewish Art, Paris; The Jewish Museum of Australia, Melbourne; The Jewish Museum of Hungary, Budapest; Washington Hebrew Congregation, Washington DC and The Sephardic Temple, Cedarhurst, New York.
