Painter and textile designer Lena Pillico (Salomea Lean Pillico Golmann) was born in Poland in 1884 and moved to England in 1914 with her husband, the well-known Polish painter, predominantly of Jewish subjects, Leopold Pilichowski (1866-1934), who went on to become President of the Ben Uri Art Society (1926-32); she was also known as Madame Pillico and Lena Pilichowski. She studied at the Slade School of Fine Art. Her early work included a bookplate design to record donors of books to the Jerusalem University Library in 1921 and she participated in the Whitechapel Art Gallery’s survey exhibitions of ‘Jewish Art’ in 1923 and 1927, respectively. She was the first female artist to exhibit with Ben Uri, arranging an exhibition in 1927 for the ‘Jewish Art & Literary Society Ben Uri’ in her St John’s Wood studio. She was also one of the first women to exhibit with the Seven and Five Society between 1923 and 1927, including in the 1927 exhibition at the Beaux Arts Gallery in London, and also exhibited at the Women's International Art Club. Her paintings included landscapes, street scenes and portraits while her decorative designs included both figurative and abstract motifs.
A contemporary reviewer in the Jewish Chronicle described her designs as ‘decorative’ and ‘in the modern spirit’, while Pilichowski, by comparison, was seen as ‘considerably more academic and [...] well known in Europe for his portraits and Jewish type pictures’. A fabric pattern designed by Pillico for W. Foxton Ltd. is illustrated in Artwork (October-December 1925) and Maurice Fort in Artwork (January-March 1926) described her 'hot-coloured exuberant fantasies', noting that 'her more complicated compositions are not always good, but her simpler work - for example the painting of embracing figures shown in the last exhibition of the Seven and Five Society - shows that she is developing on her own lines, which is certainly more worthy of praise than imitations, however good, of Matisse and Picasso'. In 1928 she was among 16 artists who exhibited work at the Brooklyn Museum exhibition of Paintings, Sculpture and Drawings by American and European Artists, showing 29 paintings (including five designs) to 17 by her husband. After Leopold Pilichowski died in 1934, Lena Pillico remained in London, where in 1936 she had a solo exhibition of 57 recent paintings of Spain and Morocco at Lucy Wertheim's London Gallery.
After the Second World War, Pillico moved in 1945 to Oxford, where she died in 1947. Her work was included posthumously in Michael Parkin's touring exhibition on The Seven and Five Society, 1920-35 (1979-80) at Atkinson Art Galleries, Southport; the Minories, Colchester; the National Museum of Wales, Cardiff; and Newlyn Orion Gallery, Penzance. Her work is also held at Salford Museum and Art Gallery.
