Arik Kilemnik

Arik Kilemnik (also known as Arie or Eric Kilemnik; born 1935, Rehovot) is an Israeli printmaker, painter, and arts institution-builder. He is best known as the founder and long-time director of the Jerusalem Print Workshop, which he established in 1974 and which became Israel's leading fine-art printmaking studio.

Kilemnik's work spans etching, lithography, screenprinting, and woodcut, and he has developed original techniques including a method known as white ground alba-tinta, sometimes called Jerusalem alba-tinta.

Early life and education

Kilemnik was born in 1935 in Rehovot, in what was then Mandatory Palestine. In the late 1950s he enrolled at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem, where he studied printmaking between 1958 and 1961. His teachers there included several figures central to the development of Israeli graphic art: Jakob Eisenscher, Isidor Ascheim, Jacob Steinhardt, Moshe Tamir, Jacob Pins, and Jossi Stern.

After completing his studies, Kilemnik taught printmaking at Cooper Union and founded a screenprinting workshop there.

Jerusalem Print Workshop

Kilemnik founded the Jerusalem Print Workshop in 1974, initially operating from a rented premises on Rabbi Akiva Street in Jerusalem, funded in part by a sum of 5,000 liras saved by his mother.

Kilemnik directed the Workshop for over fifty years. In 2025 he was succeeded as director by Tamar Gispan-Greenberg.

Artistic practice

Alongside his institutional work, Kilemnik maintained his own artistic practice throughout his career. He works in a range of print media and has developed original techniques, most notably the white ground alba-tinta (or Jerusalem alba-tinta), a method he created and refined at the Workshop.

Awards and recognition Over his career Kilemnik has received numerous awards, including the Herman Struck Prize for Printing at the Bezalel Academy (1961), the Mordechai Ish-Shalom Life Work Prize from the Artists House in Jerusalem (1997), the Jerusalem Foundation Award (2001), and the Lifetime Achievement Award in Visual Arts from Israel's Ministry of Culture and Sport (2016).