Arie Aroch

Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Arie Aroch, 2003, no. 11, p. 219, illustrated in color in the exhibition catalogue

This work is in very good condition. There are artist's pinholes on the corners. This work is mounted on cardboard.
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The following three works come from the collection of the late Abba and Suzy Eban. Abba Eban, a linguist and exceptional orator, was one of Israel's most influential statesmen, serving as a diplomat, member of the Knesset, ambassador to the United States and permanent representative to the United Nations. Among other successes, Eban also acted as President of the Weizmann Institute of Science. In 2001, he was awarded the Israel Prize for lifetime achievement and special contribution to society and the State. His wife, Suzy was born in Egypt and spent her youth in Cairo. The two met during the Second World War when Abba Eban was a British Army intelligence officer stationed in Cairo. They married in 1943 and settled in Eretz Israel. Mrs. Eban worked tirelessly on behalf of the Israel Cancer Association. From 1950 to 1998 Eban functioned as the association's founding president. 

Born in Kharkov, Russia in 1908, Aroch emigrated to Israel in 1924. He studied at the Bezalel Academy in Jerusalem and at the Academie Collarossi in Paris. He was a prominent Israeli diplomat between 1950-1970, during which time he served as ambassador to Brazil and Sweden.

Mordechai Omer discusses the Tzakpar series - of which this work is a part - in the extensive retrospective exhibition catalogue for the artist from 2003 "...Tzakpar is a childhood memory from Kharkov, an homage to a shoemaker and the sign over his shop. Inside the oblong format Aroch has added an oval frame, and inside this there floats a form that is very difficult to identify as a boot, bearing the name "Tzakpar".  The word is an invented one and does not exist in the language; it is an identifying name, not a word charged with meaning... With the aid of forms possessing a charged history, Aroch connects artisan work, art, repair, metaphysics, authority and respect. "Tzakpar" became a basic image contained integrally in the oval basic form, and Aroch returned to it again and again in various techniques. In three oil pastels from the second half of the 1960s, Aroch added several layers to this basic motif... in the painting Strange Melody, 1968-1979, the oval frame contains an abstract geometrical composition, and outside this frame, in the upper right corner of the picture, Aroch presented the three primary colors (blue, yellow and red) as signifiers of engagement with color, as the basic components of the language of painting. Except that in this painting the oval frame is contained inside another frame and then another. In a kind of 'framing mania', Aroch also painted the passe-partout surface and continued the action of painting onto the wooden frame of the picture as well." (Mordechai Omer, "Tzakpar Repairs The 1960s and 1970s" in Arie Aroch, exhibition catalogue, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, 2003, p. 220 and 222).