A Breath

AVIGDOR ARIKHA

I met Arikha for the first time in 2009. When I looked at the paintings hanging on the wall of his house or standing on the floor of his studio, I knew with absolute certainty that I was facing the greatest living painter.

Giorgio Agamben



From 19 June until 8 September 2019, the Benaki Museum presented the first-ever exhibition in Greece devoted to Arikha, a modern master of figurative painting. The exhibition showcased more than fifty of his works gathered from the artist’s own collection (now part of private collections and the artist’s estate), as well as deportation childhood drawings, and a selection of pages from some of the artist’s sketch books. This impeccably produced three-volume slipcased edition chronicles the exhibition and its contents in painstaking detail.