Abraham Palatnik

Abraham Palatnik was a Brazilian abstract artist and inventor whose innovations include kinechromatic art.

Palatnik was born in Natal, Rio Grande do Norte, lived from 1932 to 1947 in Israel before settling in Rio de Janeiro, where he spent most of his adult life. He was Jewish, and his parents were Jewish immigrants from Ukraine. He moved to Mandatory Palestine as a child in 1932 and lived there until 1947. From 1942 to 1945 he studied at the Montefiori Technical School in Tel Aviv. He later took art classes at the Municipal Art Institute of Tel Aviv.

He is considered a pioneer of technological art in Brazil for his early use of mechanical systems and light. He exhibited some of his works in the First Biennial of São Paulo in 1951.

Two works by Palatnik are in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art. In 2013, a Palatnik work Sequencia Visual S-51 sold at Christie's New York for $785,000 ($1,104,400 in current dollar terms).

Palatnik was trained in mechanics, physics and drawing in Palestine, where he remained from the age of four until his youth. On his return to Brazil in 1948, he was influenced by his friendship with the art critic Mario Pedrosa and by his visits to the Pedro II National Psychiatric Center, where in 1946 the psychiatrist Nise da Silveira had created a therapy with creative workshops, which broke the notion of art learned by Palatnik when he saw how the inmates united image and language only from the unconscious.

Text courtesy of Wikipedia, 2023