The abstract sculptor Nechemia Azaz, produced massive monumental reliefs for public buildings in the US and Israel. He moved to the UK in the 1960s to fulfil a promise made to man who died prematurely. Settling in Oxfordshire, he created architectural features for several British institutions.

Born in Berlin in 1923, and brought up in Palestine under the British mandate, he volunteered for the British Army in the war and saw service, mainly in Italy, before embarking on his art training and career.

But his early creative talent was discouraged by his parents, who left Germany when he was only three months old to settle in the co-operative village of Zichron Ya’akov in the Carmel mountain range. The wine-making settlement was founded in 1882 and adopted soon after by the French Baron Edmond de Rothschild. Nechamia’s father, who Hebraicised his surname from Zeidman to Azaz, worked as a labourer in the vineyards.

The labouring and religious background combined to form an unfavourable environment for artistic expression. Whether from this or because of his love of nature and landscape, Azaz’s work is striking for its almost complete lack of figures, whether human or from the animal kingdom.

However, his initial training in Bologna, at a stonemason’s firm, left an indelible mark, especially on his early work. A 5m-high concrete wall at the Sheraton Hotel in Tel Aviv, created in 1960, has thickly sculpted scenes of a chunky townscape along both sides of its 10m length. It cannot be overlooked, in any sense.

From the stonemasons, Azaz travelled to Amsterdam to learn from the acclaimed sculptor and stained glass-maker Cephas Stauthamer. He then went to Paris for advanced part-time study at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, where his tutors included the Russian sculptor Ossip Zadkine.

After five years of study he returned home in 1950 and served as an officer in the Israel Defence Forces. His military spell in the wild Negev desert, with its sinuous parallel lines of sand and rock formation, inspired him to work in pottery. He returned to the Netherlands to study ceramic chemistry, then went to London in 1954 for practical work. His exhibition at the Wakefield Gallery in 1954 was well received.

Back in Israel he started his career by opening a pottery school and studio in Beersheva. His first commission was a mosaic set high on the street wall of the then Evening News in Tel Aviv in 1958. The tiled mural shows a waving roll of newsprint. Over the next few years he produced a staggered row of stained glass windows for a passenger ship’s dining room, and two sculpted frontages of very different feel: a concrete wall frieze for the Architects and Engineers Association in Tel Aviv, whose widely spaced deep cut-outs make a sort of Aztec impression, and an intricate lattice wall of concrete and glass for the agricultural college in Ashkelon.

His next foray was into the US, where his early commissions in 1962 and 1963 for synagogues in and around Chicago, integrating letters from Hebrew prayers into designs for doors and door surrounds, led to huge decorative murals and sculptures for corporate offices such as the bronze wall relief on the Mony Building in Syracuse, NY.

He came to England in 1963 because he had promised to design and make the stained-glass windows for the new synagogue at Carmel College, the Jewish boarding school in Oxfordshire founded to provide a public-school education by Rabbi Kopul Rosen in 1948. Azaz carried out his word, creating a colourful account of the Six Days of Creation in bright blocks interspersed with Hebrew text.

He settled his family near by in Wallingford, while he worked as artist-in-residence at the school until 1965, making all the art works for the synagogue, sometimes with the aid of senior pupils who were invited to work with him. The architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner described the windows as “brilliant and innovative”. In 1994 Azaz carried out restoration work on the windows while the school exhibited his sculptures. Three years later the school was closed. Two years after that, in 1999, the synagogue was given a Grade 2 listing.

Wallingford became Azaz’s home for the rest of his life as he undertook new commissions. These included a superb pair of bronze-and-silver Ark doors, with a wall-fixed bronze candelabrum and a hanging Eternal Light, for the new synagogue in Belfast in 1965, as well as a set of — for him — unusually formal stained glass windows for Marble Arch Synagogue in central London. He counterbalanced his stylistic restraint in these 36 windows, which illustrate the Jewish festivals, with the absence of lead framing, resulting in a more open effect. He had several exhibitions: at the Grosvenor Gallery, London, in 1965, Zurich in 1966 and Helsinki in 1967.

Other works in Germany, at the St Barbara Church in Essen (1966), and in the US, at the Sherman House Hotel, Chicago (1967), with their intricate screens and sculpted murals, based on ground plans and landmarks, show his fascination with man’s imprint on nature. Significantly, a rare mahogany-carved figurative group, The Family, was moved from its original 1972 base at a Tel Aviv hotel to a municipal library. He found his natural expression in designs inspired by nature and artefacts, including words taken from prayers and biblical texts.

An 18-foot square carved walnut panel in the Israel Hall at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC, depicts the musical instruments named in the Bible. It was commissioned in 1972 by the Israel ambassador to the US, Yitzhak Rabin, with whom Azaz had served in the Palmach, the Jewish strike force created by the British in Palestine to help stave off a threatened German invasion. (When its disbandment was ordered in 1943, the Palmach went underground.)

As his touch lightened stylistically and technically in the 1970s, Azaz created huge shimmering mobiles for St Thomas’s Hospital, London, and Warwick University Arts Building, as well as a gleaming 3-D wall panel for Warwick’s Social Building His last important work was a sheet metal waterfall for Churchill College, Cambridge, in 1992, but he also produced many smaller pieces in stone, wood, bronze and pottery. Some of these do show the human form but in jagged outline rather than something you could stroke.

Azaz is survived by his wife, Yaffa, whom he married in 1954, and their two sons and daughter.

Nechemia Azaz, sculptor, was born on October 9, 1923. He died on October 27, 2008, aged 85