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Born in 1932, Lithuania.
Childhood and adolescence spent in Siberia (deportation).
Studies:
Moscow "1905" Art School
1954-60 Surikoff Art Academy (Moscow).
1958-72 Exhibitions in USSR (two personal exhibitions in Moscow) as well
as outside its frontiers
Since 1972, lives and works in Jerusalem, Israel.
1975-76 Chairman of the Jerusalem artists and sculpturs asosiatiom Regular
personal exhibitions in Israel, North America, Germany, Switzerland, France,
Russia.
1972-83 Teaching art for in Haifa and Jerusalem Universities and Bezalel
Art Academy
1991-99 Manager of Sanur Artists' Village.
2001- Recipient of Jerusalem Ish- Shalom Fund "For special contribution
to the development of art".
2002 Exhibited in Moscow Museum of Modern Art, "After 30 Years"
2005 Elected as honorary member of the Russian Academy of Fine Arts
2009 Exhibited in State Tretyakov Gallery - Retrospective
2014 Exhibition "Unconscious reality", Moscow Museum of Modern Art (MMOMA)
Passed away 14.2.2020 Jerusalem, Israel.
43 works of Aharon April are in various museums in the world. |
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Aharon April - Аарон Априль - אהרון אפריל
Articles & Art
(click on the title to read
נא ללחוץ על כותרת של הכתבה)
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 The
Blue bird of April
Victoria KHAN-MAGOMEDOVA
THE CULTURAL NEWS
The fantastic becomes real, and the real - fantastic.
How is one to convey the unendurable heat of the Israeli sun, the
withering light of the desert with its breathtaking mirages. This
blinding light seems to wipe out all colors.
Birds Like People 1997 |
The Russian-Israeli painter Aaron Isaakovich April succeeded to be
victorious in the battle against this light and to see in this shadow-light
environment a strange reality full of endless transformations ("Unconscious
reality", 1994). He calls the Israeli light "cruel". No wonder some
painters kill their colors with light.
Born in Lithuania in 1932, April was deported with his family to Yakutsk
(the far away Altai region) in 1941, where he graduated the middle
school. After having completed his studies in the Moscow school of
Arts, he was again deported to Yakutsk. In 1960 Aaron April graduated
the Surikov Institute of Art in Moscow and participated in the local
and all-Russia exhibitions. In 1972 he emigrated to Israel where he
taught painting and drawing in the Haifa and Jerusalem universities
and organized personal exhibitions around the world.
At the exhibition "Aaron April. Paintings, graphics 1960 -2000", The
Tretiakov gallery, Moscow, one can observe about a hundred of his
works, a vintage of the past thirty years. How unlike are his dark,
gloomy canvases, painted in the severe style of the late 1950's, from
his canvases painted in Israel: bright, expressive, unchained!
April belongs to the kind of painters who know how to tame the chaos.
Out of the colorful strokes, seemingly pulsating in disorder, suddenly
emerge faces, figures and the Dramatis Personae of the Bible ("Forte-piano",
1992, "The herald", 1995)
April is able to discern something Biblical even in the contemporary
Israelis and the reality surrounding us today. He names his paintings
when they are completed. As in the series of canvases "The Song of
Songs" (2002): the visual pondering of the artist about life and love
are in accord with the beautiful Biblical poetry, while the observer
discovers in the canvases his own associations, suggested by the Old
Testament images. They emerge as an embodiment of the country in which
he lives, the streets, in which the descendants of their Biblical
forefathers walk today ("Job", 1989). Doubtlessly, present here is
the intuitive absorption by the artist of the Biblical texts.
It was in Israel that April found an ultimate artistic freedom and
set the color at liberty. He does not aim to re-create, appealing
to reason. He pleads with emotions. It is essential for him to convey
to his creations some sort of state of fervor. One has to gaze steadily
at April's canvases and water colors in order to discover the images,
which "develop" through crystal-like structures. His landscapes render
the light well. But more often than not, in April's collisions, in
his formation of layers and stormy constructions, strange, evasive,
enigmatic images - owls, bats, roosters, a dead donkey - are born.
And the fantastic becomes real. Many images came from the far away
childhood - the dead donkey as an embodiment of fears ("Repose is
only a dream", 2002 -2003).
The uniqueness of April's method is his ability to see his images
from within in order to expose something essential, something characteristic.
No wonder that sometimes it is difficult for him to explain the appearance
of various images who are named only when the work is completed.
Actually, it is not at all important what dominates April's works,
in as much as the viewer submerges into the very mass of the pulsating,
radiant colors with all their metamorphoses and play of texture and
strokes ("The fall", 2003 -2004; "The fools' ship" (2003 - 2005).
April's watercolors, too, are well represented at the exhibition.
One of the best is "On the eve of Shabbat. Converging on the Wailing
Wall" (1993), where the architectural structures and the numerous
rows of tiny figures are jotted with an amazing precision, as if from
far above. April says that he works on his watercolors longer than
on his oils. And, indeed, in his watercolors he succeeds to render
the internal light carried by the pigment itself, while the viewer
is enwrapped and enfolded by the melting desert colors.
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