Malachi

Shmuel “Malachi” Engel was born in Hungary in 1919. As a child he received a religious Jewish education. In 1944 he was forcibly sent to a labor battalion in Hungary, Ukraine and Poland. During that time he lost his whole family to the horrors of the Holocaust. At the end of World War II he was in a transit camp in Vienna, where he met his wife Zehava. After the war he was active in the Mizrachi movement and owned a furniture factory. In 1949 he immigrated to Israel. At first he settled in Tel Aviv and made a living from drawing on the city streets. In 1951 he moved to Jerusalem, and in 1955 he set up a gallery together with Bertha Ordang, which operated for about six years. After this period he operated the “Engel Gallery” alone.

In the 1960’s Engel started using the name “Malachi”. His early works included small-scale sculpture and drawing that dealt with music, movement and animals in an abstract style. The paintings themselves was directly influenced by music, with Malachi listening to classical music while painting and letting the sounds dictate the brush movements.
Malachi dealt with a variety of subjects, with music almost always at the center of his paintings and works whether on the surface as in the paintings of the opera houses and concert halls around the world or in the abstract as in his desert paintings which he referred to as “desert sound painting”.

Malachi continued to paint and sculpt all his life until he passed away in 2014.