Arikha Avigdor (28.04.1929 – 29.04.2010) – Romanian, French, Israeli artist, who was born and raised in Chernivtsi (now Chernivtsi is a city in the southwest of Ukraine). Arikha Avigdor is Jewish, with knowledge of German.

A Jew in a German-speaking family. Isn’t it a paradox?

A twelve-year-old boy – Arikha Avigdor with his sister, alone, were left with the absurdity. The absurdity of the concentration camp, where they were driven immediately after the start of the war, in 1941. Their father died on the way. Nationality was – as the highest measure of punishment.

“Somehow we will live, somehow we will survive. Just don’t cry. I can draw. Draw a dream.” And the boy began to draw, thanks to which he survived. And he was not the only one who survived. In 1944, thanks to the Red Cross, they, with his sister, moved to Palestine… Here it is, the real concept – painting as the highest measure of life!

Perhaps painting for him was not a calling, but a way out of some absurd, stupid situation in which he found himself with his family. This is a cruel example of a case when a person is driven into a corner, the same people, in other words – acorns, but for some reason, having more right to life than they do…

Or he would have painted perhaps differently… But here the minimalism was chosen wisely, both in the palette and in the composition… A very convenient niche…

It is difficult to talk about it… The absence of facts, their minimalism… Can there be facts in the style of minimalism?
Anything can happen in the world, judging, for example, by the story of one artist…

Until 1948 he lived in a kibbutz in central Israel. In 1948, he was seriously wounded during the Arab-Israeli War, and after the operation, he spent several days in a coma. He attended the Bezalel Academy of Art In 1946-1949, where he studied under Mordechai Ardon. In 1949, he received a scholarship to study at the Paris School of Fine Arts, where he studied fresco painting. Since 1954, Arikha has lived permanently in Paris, and often visited Israel.

His wife is the American poet and translator from French Ann Eytick, they married in 1961. In 2001, she published a book of memoirs about Beckett, How It Was, translated from English into several languages.

Arikha is a translation of the artist’s family name (wide, spacious) into Aramaic. The artist adopted this new name after moving to Palestine.

In the late 1950s, he came to an abstract style, but eventually recognized this path as a dead end. In 1965, he abandoned painting and worked exclusively in graphics. He returned to painting in 1973, now combining figurativeness with minimalist elements of abstract art, close to Mondrian, in his portraits, nudes, and still lifes. He illustrated books by Hemingway and Bialik, and designed several books by Beckett, with whom he remained friends until the writer’s death; Beckett’s note to Ariha was included in the catalogue of an exhibition of the artist’s drawings from the 1965–1970s.

Ariha is the author of several commissioned portraits (Queen Elizabeth, 1983; the Prime Minister of Great Britain, 1988; Catherine Deneuve, 1990, Pierre Maurois).

He also worked as an art historian, and wrote a monograph on Ingres’s drawings (1986), a collection of articles and speeches entitled Painting and the View (1991, reprinted in 1994), On the Image (1995, in English), an essay on painting, and prefaces to catalogues of Poussin’s works, among others. He lectured at Princeton and Yale, the Frick Collection, the Prado Museum, and elsewhere.

In 2006-2007, a major retrospective of Ariha’s works from 1965-2005 was held at the British Museum. In June-September 2008, the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid showed a retrospective of his works.