Adam and Eve.

ARIKHA, AVIGDOR

1956.

Oil on canvas. Signed by the artist in Hebrew and English and dated lower left. Framed.

Raised in Bukovina, Arikha and his family were deported to the Romanian-run concentration camps of Transnistria where his father died. In 1944 safety was found in British-Mandate Palestine although Arikha was severely wounded fighting in Israel’s War of Independence. In 1949 he attended the Bezalel School of Art in Jerusalem, after which Arikha won a scholarship to study at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, a city he settled in permanently from 1954. It was in Paris that Arikha developed close and lengthy friendships with such luminaries as the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson and the Irish writer Samuel Beckett. An abstract-turned-realist artist, Arikha uses a minimal number of tones to express shade and texture and the intrinsic attempt to capture the spirit of the subject matter. His work is reminiscent of other abstract-expressionists such as Willem de Kooning and Arshile Gorky. Provenance: Acquired from the Arta Gallery, Jerusalem.