Artists

Wolf Kibel was born in Poland. His interest in art began in his childhood home and he studied briefly as a boy under Applebaum, a visiting painter from London who encouraged Kibel’s interest in painting. At the age of 20, Kibel fled to Vienna in Austria to avoid military conscription. It was in Vienna that he was exposed to Modern art and received some informal training between 1923 and 1925. During this time, he suffered extreme privation which was to affect his health for the remainder of his short life. Between 1925 and 1929 Kibel went to Palestine where he lived in Jerusalem and in Tel Aviv. He met many painters including modernist Yitzhak Frenkel. His paintings drew inspiration from the modern artists Chagall, Cézanne and Kokoschka.

In 1929 Kibel came to South Africa where he settled in Cape Town. He decorated the Alhambra Cinema in Cape Town, followed by the Plaza Cinema in Pretoria in 1931. In the same year Kibel exhibited in South Africa for the first time, and met and spent time with Hugo Naudé who taught him etching. Kibel also shared a studio in Cape Town with fellow artist and close friend Lippy Lipschitz.

Kibel’s diverse subject matter included landscapes, portraits, nudes, still lifes and interiors. His palette was muted and his scale small and intimate, and his Expressionistic distortion of forms intensified movement in his images. He produced artwork in a variety of media including oil and watercolour paintings, pastels, etchings, woodcuts and monotypes, and a drawing medium made from soot and candlewax which he used on tissue paper.

Wolf Kibel’s artwork has been exhibited in numerous prestigious group exhibitions internationally, including the Exhibition of South Africa Art held at the Tate Gallery in London in 1948, and in numerous retrospective exhibitions throughout South Africa. He held four solo exhibitions between 1931 and 1937 and died at the age of 34 shortly after his last exhibition. Wolf Kibel is highly regarded as a South African modernist and his artworks are represented in private, major museum and public art collections throughout the country.