Zvi Tolkovsky was born in Haifa in 1934. From 1956 to 1959 he studied at the Bezalel Academy of Arts & Design, Jerusalem. From 1959-1961 he lived in Paris, France where he served as an assistant to Israeli artist Yaacov Agam. Between 1966 and 1967 he resided in New York. During that time he was exposed to various techniques in the medium of screen printing. After his return to Israel, he began teaching art at Bezalel, where he set up a screen printing workshop and was active in the Mashkof interdisciplinary artist group and in the Radius group. In 1970 he set up another workshop at the Artists House Tel Aviv. From 1979 to 1981, he lived in Boston and San Francisco. In 1988 he published an artist's book published by "Bezalel". In 2007 he set up a paper production workshop at Bezalel. Tolkowsky lives in Motza Elite and works in Jerusalem and on a farm near Prague, Czech Republic.

His early works were expressionist in nature. While living in Paris, Tolkovsky began to practice photography and photo montage. He began, under the influence of pop art, combining popular images with biographical imagery in diverse media such as painting, embossing and assemblage. From 1976 to 1977, he performed artistic work in the abandoned refugee camp Nuway'imah there he collected objects from the camp and photographed the camp and its buildings, which were then presented as an exhibition at the Israel Museum. In the early 1980s he created works made of paper, which were also influenced by his encounter with Native American art.Zvi Tolkovsky