BIOGRAPHY

Yaël Artsi was born in Morocco and moved to Israel at the age of 22. There she settled in the Kibbutz Sdot-Yam, north of Tel Aviv near the old Roman city Caesarea. In 1973, already a mother of two children, she finally gets the chance to do what she always wanted to do and study art and sculpture in Paris. Yaël studies monumental sculpture with the famous sculptor Etienne Martin and marble and wood at Cola Marini’s studio. She graduates the Beaux Arts academy in Paris in 1975.

Back in Israel she has a tremendous energy to create. Her career as a sculptor develops rapidly since then. In the eighties she has exhibitions worldwide and her work is to be found in many private collections. In 1989 she comes across a plan to create an international park in Eilat – an Israeli desert city on the borders of Israel, Egypt and Jordan. She curates and organizes the work, inviting four other international sculptors to participate. The result is the Peace sculpture Garden in the center of Eilat. Working together with other artists towards one goal became a specialty of Yaël which was to be repeated in 1998 in the Sculpture Park Ashdod and in 1999 in the Park in Farum Denmark.

Yaël’s sculptures can be huge monumental objects as well as intimate smaller works. Childhood influences from Morocco are much present in her sculptures. Especially her earlier work contains an oriental atmosphere of warmth and intimacy. Her huge female shapes are full of emotion. Yaël works with stone, bronze and wood, sometimes combined with other materials such as iron which she wants to use more and more.

Yaël still lives with her husband in the beautiful kibbutz Sdot-Yam where she designed and occupies a large studio, surrounded by a sculpture park, overlooking the sea.