Avraham Binder Israeli (1906-2001) ABSTRACT STREET SCENE oil on canvas, framed, signed: lower left H21" W15" *Artist biography: Particularly memorable are his urban landscapes with their predominance of blues and aquamarines, composed of a profusion of squares and rectangles, crowding one another and covering nearly the entire canvas. The angular shapes are interspersed with radiant dots of red, gold and yellow, like the lights of the big city. Traces of these shapes are discernible in Binder's work to this day, in the angularity of splashes of color which, no longer crowded together, are now well separated to create an airy spaciousness. Not only the splashes of color - the intervening space, too - creates figurative effects in the artist's treatment. Abraham Binder is not a "cerebral" painter. Neither identified with any particular modern school, nor preaching any narrow artistic doctrine, he is an emotional artist: his inspiration, derived from the heart, leads him on to the most varied range of treatments in his artistic work. In vain might one try to persuade him to define his personal conception of painting. He is not one to indulge in verbal explanations. But his sheer artistic skill, his virtuosity with the paint brush, did impel him to experiment widely with the artistic techniques of the modern age. And his exceptional talent stood him in good stead in all this experimentation. Binder's large-scale urban landscapes are not mere constructs to represent our present-day architecture with its pervasive angularity. Made up as they are of large splashes of color, Binder's unique color composition qualifies these canvases to be ranked among the foremost artistic works in Israeli painting. They are uniquely Binder, very different from what we see in the work of his contemporaries. He has also done large paintings of Jerusalem - not the Jerusalem of gloom and holiness, but a Jerusalem of contrast to the flat topography of Tel-Aviv; it is this different topography which here provides the challenge for him as a painter. And the colors - the colors are bright, full of light, an inner illumination which seems to emanate from the artist himself, rather than from the sun beating down from above. So many great artists have built their life's work upon watercolors. Binder's watercolors are in no way inferior in their artistic worth to many of those, what with their spontaneity, their translucent quality, their color combinations, and the artist's ability to say so much with an economy of brush strokes. Abraham Binder's insatiable curiosity has advanced him into the front ranks of our nation's artists. Courtesy of: David Giladi, Safari Gallery, Jerusalem Israel.