Mindy Weisel is an American abstract artist residing in Israel. She was born in Bergen-Belsen, Germany to survivors of the Auschwitz concentration camp. She began to paint when she was 14 years old, seeking to find a voice for her feelings and experiences. After moving to the US, Weisel studied at California State University and the Otis Art Institute. She then moved to Washington, DC, earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at George Washington University. She had post-graduate studies at the American University.
Weisel’s emotionally evocative and beautifully-crafted paintings aim to create light out of darkness. The critic Mark Rudman wrote in Art News, “Mindy Weisel is a painter with a predilection for black. But there is something unusual about the blackness in her paintings: it gives off a kind of light. Hers is a mediated darkness. It is as if the brush had fermented in the paint before it touched the canvas.” “There is no question that this is spiritual painting.”
The Washington Post critic and artist Michael Welzenbach described her work: “Her richly colored abstracts positively glow.”
Weisel has shown extensively since the late 1970s in DC, New York, Chicago, and elsewhere in the US, as well as in Germany and Israel. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian Institute’s National Museum of American Art, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum, the Kreeger Museum, the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Museum, the US House of Representatives, as well as numerous important private collections.
