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AVIGDOR ARIKHA
was one of the most independent-minded artists of the twentieth century. In 1965, at the height of a successful career as an abstract painter, he suddenly stopped painting to return to drawing from life in order to assuage a ‘violent hunger in the eye’ released by his experience of the great Caravaggio exhibition that year. When he returned to painting in 1973, it was to begin the series of intensely observed portraits, nudes, and still lifes for which he is known worldwide.