Avigdor Arikha

Avigdor Arikha was born on 28 April 1929 in Rădăuți, Bukovina, Romania, and died on 29 April 2010 in Paris — a life that spanned one of the most turbulent centuries in European history and produced one of its most quietly radical bodies of work. Of German-Jewish origin, Arikha survived internment at a Nazi camp in Transnistria as a child, an experience that left a direct mark on his art: the drawings he made during his imprisonment between approximately 1941 and 1944 are among his earliest known works, acts of observational witness carried out under extreme conditions. In 1944 he was rescued to Palestine, where he trained at the Bezalel School of Arts in Jerusalem, before settling permanently in Paris in 1950 — a city that would remain his home and his working world for the rest of his life.

Arikha worked as a painter, draughtsman, printmaker, and art historian, and the discipline of looking was the thread connecting all four roles. From 1975 onward, his practice became defined by a rigorous and distinctive methodology: he painted only from life, in natural light, completing each work in a single session. The still lifes he produced across the following decades — in oil on canvas and works on paper — are among the most celebrated expressions of this approach, capturing ordinary objects at a precise, unrepeatable moment of illumination. The commitment to direct observation that shaped these works reaches back to those earliest camp drawings, giving his mature practice a psychological gravity that sets it apart from mere technical virtuosity. Scholars and critics have frequently placed his engagement with the visible world in dialogue with the Old Masters he studied and wrote about as an art historian.

Arikha's work entered major institutional collections during his lifetime, including the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the National Galleries of Scotland, and the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh. Exhibitions at the Bibliothèque Nationale and the British Museum reflected the breadth of his printmaking and works on paper, while a solo presentation at the Bibliothèque nationale de France in 2008, Avigdor Arikha. Gravure sur le vif, focused specifically on his graphic work. His long association with Marlborough Gallery in London was followed, after his death, by an estate exhibition there, Avigdor Arikha – Paintings and Works on Paper. In 2022, Duane Thomas Gallery in New York mounted the first survey exhibition of his work in that city. Most recently, Fine Art Society in London — which holds primary representation — presented Avigdor Arikha: From Life in 2025. His estate, believed to be family-run, remains active, and copyright and reproduction rights in the United Kingdom are managed by DACS.