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Summer Exhibition 2009 Avigdor Arikha was born to German-speaking Jewish parents in Rădăuţi, near Czernowitz, in Bukovina, Romania. His family faced forced deportation in 1941 to the concentration camps of Western Ukraine, where his father died. He managed to survive thanks to the drawings he made of deportation scenes, which were shown to delegates of the International Red Cross. As a result of that, both he and his sister were freed and brought to Palestine in 1944. Until 1948, he lived in Kibbutz Ma'ale HaHamisha. In 1948 he was severely wounded in Israel's War of Independence. From 1946 to 1949, he attended the Bezalel School of Art in Jerusalem; its teaching was based on the Bauhaus methods. In 1949 he was awarded a scholarship which enabled him to study at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, where he learned the fresco technique. Since 1954, Arikha has continuously resided in Paris. Arikha has been married since 1961 to the American poet and writer Anne Atik. |
Click on image to see full details of this work This work will be exhibited at Joseph’s Bookstore, 1257 Finchley Road , Temple Fortune, London NW11 |
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Artistic
career In
the late 1950s, Arikha evolved into abstraction and established himself
as an abstract painter, but he eventually came to
think of abstraction as a dead end. In 1965 he stopped painting and
began drawing, only from life, treating all subjects in a single
sitting. Continuing on this path for the next eight years, his activity
was confined to drawing and printmaking until late 1973, when he felt an
urge to resume painting. His practice has remained to paint directly
from the subject, using no preliminary drawing, finishing a painting,
pastel, print, ink or drawing in one session. He is noted for his
portraits, nudes, still lifes, and landscapes, rendered realistically
and spontaneously, but clearly bearing the lessons of abstraction, and
in particular of Mondrian. He has also illustrated some of
the texts of Samuel Beckett, with
whom he maintained a close friendship until the writer's death. Arikha
has painted a number of commissioned portraits, including that of H.M.
Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother
(1983), Lord Home of
the Hirsel, former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (1988), both in the
collection of the Scottish
National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh. Other portraits include those of Catherine Deneuve (1990) for the French
State, or that of the former Prime Minister Pierre Mauroy for the city of Lille. As
an art historian, Arikha has written catalogues for exhibitions on Poussin and Ingres
for which he was curator at the Musée du Louvre, the Frick Collection of New York, the Museum of Fine
Arts, Houston, and the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. His writings
include Ingres, Fifty Life Drawings (Museum of Fine Arts, Houston/Frick
Collection, New York, 1986); Peinture et Regard (Paris: Hermann, 1991,
1994); On Depiction (London: Bellew Publishing, 1995); and numerous
essays published in the New York
Review of Books, The New Republic, Commentaire,
Literary Imagination, etc. He has also lectured
widely, at Princeton
University, at Yale University, at
the Frick Collection in
New York, at the Prado Museum in Madrid, and at many other venues. Most recently,
he was invited by the Thyssen-Bornemisza
Museum in Madrid to select a number of works from its
collection and to write the entries for the catalogue accompanying the
resulting exhibition Please email info@hgsummershow.org or call 020 7275 0383 for further information. Taken
from Wikipedia |
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