Yehouda Chaki in front of his oil on canvas landscape from 2016 (photo by Hannah Sophia Aronoff-Stachtchenko, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)
Canadian artist Yehouda Chaki has died in Montreal at the age of 84.
Throughout his 64-year career, he created landscapes, sculptures, glass artworks and drawings, which hang in collections and galleries around the world, including Musee d’Art Contemporain de Montreal, Beaverbrook Art Gallery, Eretz Israel Museum and Philadelphia Museum.
Despite a 17-year battle with Parkinson’s disease, Chaki continued to paint until a few months before his death in September 2023, according to an obituary in the Montreal Gazette.
Chaki was the founder and head of the Saidye Bronfman Centre’s department of painting and drawing, where he taught for 25 years. He also created the bronze statue that was presented to Giller Prize winners from 1994 to 2004.
Born in 1938 to a Jewish family in Athens, Greece, Chaki spent five years in hiding with his brother and parents during the Holocaust. His installation of 117 portraits of Holocaust victims, Mi Makir, was on view at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in 2021 and is now on the museum’s website. Many of the 117 portraits are of his family members who were killed in the Holocaust.
After the Second World War, Chaki’s family moved to Israel. He then moved from Tel Aviv to Paris in 1960 and Montreal in 1962, where he continued to make art and teach.
He is represented in Toronto by Odon Wagner Gallery and in Vancouver by Gallery Jones.
“We had the great pleasure of knowing Chaki for over 30 years,” the Gallery Jones team said in an email. “His kindness, empathy, curiosity and joy are wonderful examples of how to greet the world and those in it every day.”
“He lived for his art,” his partner Grace Aronoff told the Montreal Gazette. “He made great demands of himself. He worked six days a week all his life.
“He would laugh when he heard others say they would have to wait for inspiration. He would say that inspiration came from standing in front of a blank canvas.”
Source: Gallery Jones, Montreal Gazette
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