Yosl Bergner, born in 1920 in Vienna, is a son of the Yiddish poet, Melech Ravitch. In 1937 he immigrated to Australia where he served the armed forces. In 1948 he left Australia for Paris. Two years later Bergner arrived to Israel and settled in Safed and afterwards in Tel Aviv. He participated in numerous exhibitions in Melbourne, Paris, Tel-Aviv New York and in the Venice Biennale and the Sao Paulo Biennale. “He paints still lives as though to install stabilizers against the turbulence of the dream, and perhaps these stabilizers serve him in time as a touchstone.” Nissim Aloni, 1983 The Surrealism served as a source of inspiration for Bergner, though he does not consider himself a surrealist but a lover of stories, and indeed narrative elements appear frequently in his work. He uses the “displacement” element, as the Surrealists did, and that is detaching the figures, objects or landscapes from the logical context and into a poetical-magical climate.
Bergner passed away in December of 2016.