Avigdor Arikha, 'Interiors and Still Lifes, 1969-2009': Curated by Craig Burnett

Avigdor Arikha: Interiors and Still Lifes, 1969-2009 is a focused survey of sixteen works on paper and one on canvas. The exhibition aims to demonstrate that Arikha was an artist devoted to the wonders of everyday life – a devotion that allowed him to transform humble objects into timeless form. Already a successful painter of abstracts throughout the late 1950s and early 60s, Arikha had a life-changing visit to a Caravaggio exhibition at the Louvre in 1965. Deciding that direct observation was as urgent as any other modern art form, he turned to the people and things nearest to him for subject matter. From then on, he drew and painted only from life and always in natural light, completing works within a day through rapt sessions of deep attention. Starting anew with what he called a ‘hunger in the eye’, he used only monochrome for seven years before returning, in 1973, to painting and colour.

One of Arikha’s earliest representational works, A Glimpse into the Dining Room (1969) reveals the artist’s close attention to the geometric structure of the picture plane. Likewise, Books and Persian Helmet (1976), a drawing of the artist’s library, and Établi à Roulettes (2008), a view of his painting materials, show the artist’s lifelong commitment to strict principles of composition that he developed as an abstract artist. ‘I wouldn’t draw or paint anything without this attachment to pure form’, he said in 1992, while reflecting on the work of Piet Mondrian. The three monochrome works share a wall with Interior with Drawings (1988), Pastel Boxes (1983) and Noh Mask and Boxes (1987). Each of these pastels, in warm hues, display a similar attention to geometry, while also introducing his mastery of both naturalistic colour, and the medium of pastel, which was crucial to the artist throughout the 1980s. Amid these works on paper hangs one of the artist’s last oil paintings, Umbrella (2009), a vivid, characterful portrait of that most anonymous of objects.

Throughout his life, even while depicting the humble tools of his trade, Arikha’s work revealed the enduring influence of modernist abstraction. This is visible in a pastel such as Red Funnel and Green Bottle (1983), in which a combination of familiar objects evokes both a modernist such as Giorgio Morandi and the Renaissance ideal of geometric harmony. On either side of this work are two more pastels, Green and White Gloves (2008) and Hammers and Pliers (2000): ordinary objects and tools rendered as objects of veneration. These later pastels reveal the artist’s persistent attention to the principle of abstract structure, recalling the grid-like rhythm in the composition of Tubes of Paint in their Drawer (1985, Tate). Surrounded by objects that shape his vision as an artist as well as his daily life, these small, workaday items reflect Arikha’s view that all things, no matter how modest – or indeed, because they are modest – are worthy of transformation into timeless form.

From Caravaggio’s Basket of Fruit to an apple that astonished Paris by Paul Cezanne, the still life genre has provided a platform for artists to depict simple things with hints of otherworldliness. Arikha’s pastels Rhubarb (1989), Bourgeon (1983) and Plate of Nuts (1985) participate in that tradition. The buds depicted in Bourgeon seem to yearn for the sky, while the red and green stalks of rhubarb glow with a vivid life force. Apple, Half-Peeled on a Black Plate (1976) shows the peel of an apple curling away, a hint that the artist has captured a moment of transformation, from an object with a deep history as a symbol to an everyday snack. Similarly, the austere, tumbling forms of Feuillages Sombres (1994) capture forever a moment of imminent change.

Arikha was an artist obsessed equally with immediate, sensual experience and the endless delights of great painters and historical artworks. Avigdor Arikha: Interiors and Still Lifes, 1969- 2009 reveal this double focus: above all, the intimate works show an artist whose own life was marked by continuous flux, attempting – through art – to fix and depict particular moments and sensations. From the painter’s tools to an apple or an umbrella, Arikha was a master at capturing the ephemeral beauty embodied by everyday things.

Craig Burnett, August 2026