MADRID.- From 10 June the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza is showing the first retrospective exhibition in Spain of the Israeli painter Avigdor Arikha. A total of 95 works – oils, drawings, and pastels – to offer the visitor a complete overview of the artist’s work from 1965 to the present day. The exhibition continues the Museum’s strategy of organising exhibitions of contemporary art and once again focuses on the work of a living artist.

Avigdor Arikha is an Israeli painter and draughtsman who has lived in Paris since 1954. His work is known and appreciated by a select group of collectors, critics and artists. Arikha is also an acknowledged art historian and exhibition curator as well as a brilliant writer and lecturer. For decades he has passionately defended the practice of painting from life based on first-hand observation. Arikha’s portraits, nudes, landscapes and still lifes are particularly well known, executed in a spontaneous and realist manner, generally in a single sitting and without preparatory studies.

Following very early experiments with painting from life undertaken in his childhood and teenage years, Arikha’s career began in the 1950s. In 1953 and 1954 he became known as an illustrator, producing drawings to accompany texts by Rilke, Gogol and others. From around 1958 the artist produced dark, tormented abstract works that can to some extent be related to post-war Abstract Expressionism. March 1965 marked a crucial turning point for Arikha’s later output. Realising that he had embarked on an artistic dead-end, he decided that abstraction was finished and that he would abandon painting. According to the artist’s own account, on 10 March 1965 he got up in the morning and started to draw from life.

For eight years and in addition to studying art history, Arikha devoted all his efforts to working directly from life, producing only drawings and prints (mainly black and white etchings) until he returned to painting in late 1973.

It was during these years (1965 to 1973) that Arikha developed and implemented his theory of working from life as for the artist only this approach has the authenticity that a work of art should possess. As a result, he works in a limited range of genres: portraits, nudes, still lifes, interiors and landscapes, and also limits the creative process to one or at the most two sessions without the use of preparatory drawings or photographic images. His intention is to capture the traces of life in the chosen subject and his motifs are true fragments of reality, intensely experienced and depicted in a spontaneous manner using a nervous, energetic brushstroke, a diffused, whiteish light and a colour range often based on white and earthy tones. In addition we find a careful structuring of the picture surface, which gives Arikha’s works a distinctive and characteristic compositional rhythm and atmosphere.

With regard to technique, Arikha primarily works in oil, pastel and drawing, the latter in both pencil and pen and ink. The second technique occupies an important place in his oeuvre as this was the first method that he adopted in 1965.

The exhibition is structured to offer a survey of Arikha’s career, starting in the key year of 1965 at the moment of his complete and definitive rejection of abstraction and his artistic “resurrection”. Almost 100 works are displayed in three different rooms. Two features his paintings, which are arranged more or less chronologically and (following the artist’s request) lit with natural light, while the third gallery offers a comprehensive display of his highly distinctive drawings and pastels that have played such an important role in his output.

Avigdor Arikha was born in Bukovina (Rumania) into a German-speaking Jewish family on 28 April 1929. He attended primary school in Hebrew, studied the violin and executed his first portraits based on first-hand observation at the age of nine. From the age of ten Arikha was among those persecuted by the Soviet regime and the Nazis and in 1941 he was deported with his family to various labour camps in the eastern Ukraine, where his father died in 1942. Arihka’s highly realistic drawings of the deportations saved him when they reached the hands of international Red Cross delegates in December 1943. This organisation directed the liberation of orphans in early 1944 and Arikha and his sister were rescued and sent to Palestine. Over the following years the artist lived in the Ma’aleh-Hahamisha kibbutz near Jerusalem. From 1946 Arikha studied art at the Bezalel Arts and Crafts School in that city, a progressive institution whose teachings were based on those of the Bauhaus. On the outbreak of the Arab-Israeli war, Arikha abandoned his studies in order to take part. He was seriously wounded in January 1948 but nonetheless took part in the defence of the kibbutz, in whose trenches he once again produced drawings and pastels from life. Following the ceasefire Arikha settled in Jerusalem in the autumn of 1948, returned to his art studies and began to study philosophy.

In September 1949 he moved to Paris and enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts with a grant from the Youth Aliyah. In 1950 and 1951 he visited Italy then returned to Jerusalem where he lived until 1953. At that date he returned to Europe and travelled in various countries before setting permanently in Paris one year later. In 1964 Arikha represented Israel at the Venice Biennale. From 1993 to 1994 he was the subject of a major retrospective held at the Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Edinburgh museums. Avigdor Arikha has curated exhibitions in institutions as important as the Musée du Louvre He has also lectured at the Frick Collection, New York. He has written a number of essays, some of which were published in Peinture et Regard (1991), published in English as On Depiction (1994).