Zvi Mairovich 1911-1973 or 1974

Born in Poland, Mairovich moved to Berlin in 1929, where he began to study painting with Karl Hofer. In 1934 he settled in Haifa and in 1949-1950 he worked in Paris.  He participated in the first New Horizons exhibition in Tel Aviv and won the Dizengoff prize three times. In the late fifties he moved from the figurative to the abstract.  This shift was accompanied by a change in his use of colour. By the 1960’s his palette was brighter and more varied as in Mizpeh Ramon.  ‘The jagged lines retain something of its “natural” form, but the moment the red is hurled upon the black, it instigates a violent drama between red and black. Neither forms nor “composition” are the main concern; rather, the deep “vertical” structure of the painting: the paint-warm, living, blood-like – is flung onto the all-consuming background of black, whereupon, by means of its dilution with turpentine, there comes about, before our very eyes, the devouring of the red by the black’ (Ariel Hirschfeld ‘Zvi Mairovich – in Pursuit of “the Nature of the Painting”’ in Zvi Mairovich 1911-1974 (exhibition catalogue), Tel Aviv, 2000, n.p.)