Steffa Reis was born into a Jewish family in Berlin, Germany in 1931 and, fleeing anti-Semitism, settled in England with her family in 1937. She studied at Harrow School of Art (now University of Westminster), before immigrating to Israel in 1957, where she studied with Marcel Janco, and later at The Royal Academy Schools, London and the Lithographic Print Workshop in Paris. Reis continues to work at her studio in Tel Aviv and in the Safed Artists Colony in northern Israel.
Painter Steffa Reis (née Tennenbaum) was born the only child of an assimilated Jewish family in Berlin, Germany on 1 July 1931. Her father, Michael, was a chemist of Polish origin, who received a classical education and spoke many languages; her mother, Ilse, aspired to be a professional singer while taking office jobs to earn a living.
Following the rise of Nazism in Germany, Reis’s father fled to England in 1933 and she joined him with her mother in late 1937. As refugees they endured great difficulties and, during the Second World War, Reis’s parents were not allowed to practice their respective professions as they were considered ‘enemy aliens’. Her mother was diagnosed with cancer and died in 1945, when Reis was only 13 years old. She attended schools in Cardiff and Liverpool where she received her primary art education, and later enrolled in the Harrow School of Art in north London (now the University of Westminster).
Reis subsequently married and immigrated to Israel with her young family in 1957, where she studied with émigré painters, Romanian-born Marcel Janco and Russian-born Yaacov Vexler (Jacob Wechsler). Reiss revisited Europe to study at the Royal Academy Schools in London and at the Lithographic Print Workshop in Paris. Upon her return to Israel in 1969, she established her studio in the artists' colony in Safed, in the north of the country and, from 1980, in Tel Aviv, regularly visiting the colony during the summer. In 1976, when the Ben Uri Gallery was associated with the Israeli Embassy in London in its support of Israeli artists, she held a solo exhibition comprising ‘naturalistic and charming’ Israeli landscapes which demonstrated great atmospheric perception, as well as abstract work. Peter Stone, art critic for the Jewish Chronicle singled out her pictures of the Golan Heights during the 1973 Yom Kippur war, in which the artist conveyed ‘this traumatic experience suffused in a burning symbolic red. This is what she herself felt of the terrible disaster that covered the land, and so the best of them rise above the surrounding competence. They are real’ (Stone 1976, p. 20). In 1986 she showed in London again, at Gallery 10 on Grosvenor Street. The exhibition included landscapes, seascapes and still lifes in oils, acrylic and pastel that revealed her shift from semi-abstract to figurative work, as well as the development of her visual imagery. The Jewish Chronicle commented that ‘Often vibrant in colour, her paintings, though firmly tied to physical reality, resolve themselves into telling interpretations of particular experiences’. In particular, art critic Barry Fealdman (also Ben Uri's secretary) praised her ‘Tel Aviv marina, with the masts and hulls of the crowded group of boats suggesting a kind of cosmic vision; some gorgeous still lifes; and ethereal pastels’, concluding that ‘the whole exhibition bears witness to the sensitivity, imagination and skill of this richly gifted artist (Fealdman 1986, p. 15). Other exhibitions included Pauline Podbrey Gallery (1988) and White House Gallery (1998).
In her paintings, often labelled as experiential, Reis is interested in exploring the intersections between music, dance and the visual arts through the abstraction of movement. She also continues to be fascinated by architecture and urban structures that she renders in an almost abstract expressionist manner. Steffa Reiss currently lives and works in Israel and her works are held in numerous public collections around the world; in the UK public domain her work is held by the Ben Uri Collection
Steffa Reis in the Ben Uri collection
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Steffa Reis]
Publications related to [Steffa Reis] in the Ben Uri Library