NINETTO PRESENTS AVIGDOR ARIKHA

Arikha spent a lifetime refusing to look away. A child survivor of wartime deportation, saved in part
by drawings he made of the camps that reached the Red Cross, he abandoned abstraction after
standing in front of a Caravaggio, and from that day painted only what sat in front of him, in a
single sitting, from life, never from memory.
Worn shoes, cracked walls, yesterday’s newspaper already destined for the fire, his own aging
face caught mid-shout:
nothing was too ordinary to earn his full attention.
His self-portraits and still lifes carry a raw, almost startled charge, echoes of a childhood spent
surviving what most people never have to picture. What held everything together was discipline
alone, staying faithful to what was actually there, before it could change.