Aviva Uri, Israeli, 1927–1989

Aviva Uri , Israeli, 1927–1989

Landscape II , 1960

Black chalk on paper, 492 x 692 mm

Signed and dated, lower right: “Aviva Uri 60”

Anonymous gift, on the occasion of the Israel Museum’s 20th anniversary

647.85

 

The early works of Aviva Uri emulate the virtuoso, clean, and classical lines of her life companion, David Hendler, with whom she studied. Her art developed from the linear to the painterly, from the manipulation of external forms to a subjective personal representation, and her flowing line achieved an independence unprecedented in the brief history of Israeli draftsmanship, paving the path for generations of artists to follow.

 

For Uri, reality was only a point of departure: the sheet of paper represented an entire universe, the external world, and the lines she placed on it (being, as she said, “full of fear of the empty sheet”) functioned as eruptions of her inner being. Abandoning realism in the early 1960s for extreme stylization and an ascetic denial of detail, she later returned to it with her own idiosyncratic symbols and forms, such as the bird shape.

 

In this sheet Uri represents landscape, or the idea of landscape: The horizontal division she favors often implies heavenly and earthly elements; it has a fragmentary look that hints at the vast whole. The lower “earth” section is inhabited by what appears, simultaneously, to be one large tree reaching to the sky and several different imaginary plants, leaving the greater part of the sheet empty for its whiteness to participate actively in the composition. Line itself, in a strong evocation of the art of the Orient, becomes the actual subject.