AVIVA URI

Born into a family of Ukrainian Zionist and socialist refugees who settled in Palestine in 1920, Aviva Uri lost her mother shortly after her birth. This was a decisive event for the artist’s future work, who never ceased oscillating between creation and destruction, life and chaos, birth and death (Little Earth, 1985). Artist David Hendler – whom she married in 1941 – introduced her to drawing, which became her exclusive media. The at times coloured line played a central role in her spirited compositions mixing mysterious inscriptions and automatic writings, simultaneously evoking Kabbalistic symbols and Zen calligraphy. In its bare simplicity, this pure line expresses the trace of absence and want while revealing the bubbling of life in gestation (Parallels in the Judean Hills, 1961). Inventing her own signs in her cosmic works that at times recall the universe of American Cy Twombly, she explored the links between drawing and writing while insisting on the vitality of gesture and the fleetingness of phenomena (Composition, Haifa, 1970).