Itzchak Tarkay was born in 1935 in Subotica on the Yugoslav-Hungarian border. Towards the end of World War II, Tarkay was sent with his family to the Mathausen concentration camp by the Nazis. Tarkay was only nine years old at this time. Tarkay’s family survived and returned home after the war and Itzchak developed a keen interest in art, He won a prize for excellence in painting while still in school in Subotica. In 1949 Tarkay and his family immigrated to Israel and were sent to the transit camp for new arrivals at Beer Yaakov.

The next two years were spent in a Kibbutz. In 1951 Tarkay received a scholarship to the Bezalel Art Academy where he studied for one year before he had to leave due to difficult financial circumstances at home. In order to continue his scholarship, Tarkay was allowed to study under the artist Schwartzman until his mobilization in the Israeli Army. After his service term ended, Tarkay returned to his familiar environment in Tel Aviv and enrolled in the Avni Institute of Art, which he completed in 1956.

Today, Itzchak Tarkay is one of the most popular and loved artists in the world. A modern master, very much alive and very much in the moment, Tarkay draws upon the entire realm of art history in a body of work that is not only aesthetically agreeable and compositionally seductive, but a cultural phenomenon responsible for countless love letters, innumerable nights of passion and incalculable furtive glances - the very substance of visual poetry.