Avigdor Arikha: From Life

Born in 1929 in Romania, Avigdor Arikha was forcibly deported to the concentration camps of Transnistria in the Second World War. At the age of fifteen he was moved to the British Mandate of Palestine where he was schooled in Jerusalem, mostly by Bauhaus teachers who had escaped Germany. By the 1950s he had established himself among the artists and intellectuals of Paris.

Arikha was an abstract painter until the mid-1960s when, encouraged by his great friend Alberto Giacometti, he found renewed passion in representation, and for the rest of his life embraced painting from life in a single sitting using only natural light. In 1956 he met Samuel Beckett and formed a close friendship which was to have a profound impact on his life.

With family, friends and the everyday as his subjects, Arikha’s work is celebrated for its immediacy and spontaneity.