Geula Zylberman

Geula was born in Tel Aviv in 1931 and emigrated to Venezuela in 1940, where she would spend her life turning the country's landscapes, people, and light into paint. She began her formal study of the arts in 1947 in Caracas, learning under a generation of distinguished Venezuelan masters, and continued at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes and the Escuela de Artes Plásticas "Cristóbal Rojas."

Her studies took her abroad — observing the evolution of the plastic arts in Paris, Geneva, and Barcelona, and at the Bezalel School in Israel — before she returned to Venezuela to deepen her work in painting and sculpture. In 1969 she rose to national fame as part of the figurative movement taking root across Latin America, painting picturesque Venezuelan landscapes and renowned portraits of Simón Bolívar.

In 1950 she married Gerszon Zylberman, a Polish citizen who had enlisted in the British Army during the Second World War. Together they built a family of three children — Yaeli, Ygal, and Ilana. In her later years, true to her ancestral roots, Geula turned toward Judaica themes carrying a strong Israeli and Zionist sentiment. Across every period, her art remained a portrait of identity itself — Venezuelan and Israeli, woven together on canvas.