Two figures sit across from each other beneath a stone arch — one in a chair, one on a striped settee — with a bowl of something between them and a whole harbor stretching out behind. Sailboats. A distant city skyline. The faintest wash of blue where the water meets the sky. They're not quite human. They never are with Bergner. These are his people — part animal, part puppet, part memory — the figures that populated his paintings for sixty years, displaced creatures making the best of wherever they've landed.

This is a hand-colored serigraph, marked A/P — artist's proof — meaning it never entered the numbered edition. Bergner pulled it for himself, then went back in by hand with color, making this impression a unique work. The palette is restrained: pale greens in the mat area of the scene, the muted blues of the harbor beyond, a touch of warmth in the figures' clothing. The arch frames everything like a proscenium, and you get the feeling these two have been sitting here a long time, not saying much, perfectly content.

Bergner was born in Vienna in 1920, grew up in Warsaw, fled to Melbourne at seventeen. He served four years in the Australian Army, fell in with the painters who would become the Angry Penguins — Sidney Nolan, Arthur Boyd, Albert Tucker — and then left for Israel in 1950, where he stayed the rest of his life. He won the Israel Prize for painting in 1980. His work hangs in the Israel Museum, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, and the National Gallery of Victoria. He illustrated Kafka in Yiddish. He painted kitchen graters as if they had souls. He died in Tel Aviv in 2017 at ninety-six, still working.

This is a hand-colored serigraph, marked A/P — artist's proof — meaning it never entered the numbered edition.

Professionally framed in a dark wood frame with sage green matting. Hand-signed in pencil lower right. Marked "A/P" (artist's proof) lower left.