Beschreibung:

Untitled, 1972 mixed media and collage on paper 33 x 22 cm (12 ¾ x 8 ½ in.) signed and dated center right Provenance: Collection of Yehudit Shaltiel, Israel. Exhibited: Arie Aroch Tel Aviv Museum of Art, 27 February - 24 May 2003. Literature: Mordechai Omer, Arie Aroch Israel, 2003, p. 319, pl. 8 (illustrated). The two smaller works by Aroch in this auction are Untitled paintings from 1967 and 1972 (lot#s). They belong to a second stage of the artist's work, where one feels he is freer in expression and less restrained by theoretical thinking. The two depict a similar subject: an angel in flight. In the earlier Untitled (1967) (lot #) the angel is more clearly defined. Depicted in panda colors on newspaper the angel is shown in full flight in a blue rectangle that looks like the sky. Directly below is a brown rectangle that would seem to depict a barren patch of land, while to the left is a white rectangle set vertically to the others in which is written in large type letters an inscription which is partly erased reading "THE BIG STEP UP". While the division of the work into colored rectangles might recall again the paintings of Rothko, it is more to Robert Rauschenberg and to Pop art that this painting makes a certain reference. The use of newspaper cuttings and freer pastiche of different materials, and the declarative manifesto are typical of this imagery. But Aroch's rhetoric is somewhat more refined and inward looking than that of these artists both in the making of the work as in its symbolic meaning. The angel is interpreted by Mordechai Omer as symbolizing?"the desire of humans to transcend beyond their limits, to take off and fly, to resemble the celestial'. In Jewish art the angel is also charged with an historical meaning "whose possible fall means the destruction of the Jewish world that existed in the past", but at the same time the angel is in Israeli art a vehicle for change a possible "partner in the Creation". (Omer, Arieh Aroch, pp,325-326) The coupling of the angel with the all telling inscription would point that Aroch was seeking to represent here an angel of change, possibly one that is thrusting towards a new personal artistic creative boundary. But the artist would have been none the less conscious of the historical implications of the angel. As Omer writes, there seems to be an hidden irony in the painting, that can be seen in the fact that the inscription is partly erased and covered by a layer of wash, in the "weighing down of the angel by letters in his boots" and more tellingly in a grid that cuts though the angels body as if holding him down. This according to Omer would be the effect of the ?Angelus Novus', Walter Benjamin's famous angel of history "that stands between past and future and motivates it to return to the place from which I came" symbolizing the effect of the Holocaust on art (Omer, pp. 322) The later work on paper, Untitled (1972) (lot #), is more abstract and less complex in its meaning. The angel is painted in the lower part of the work his head turned downwards, as if he were a ?fallen angel' from the sky. The land is depicted in an unnatural way above the sky, an ochre colored patch in which two open squares inter-relate, a red and a blue one, creating a strong sense of movement and ?psychological tension'. This tension between forms is not so much an aesthetical one but a repercussion of an unstable world, one that is upside-down, because it has not achieved yet a stable and safe bearing. Aroch could be relating to the tradition of the upside-down world (also called the topsy turvy world), in Early- Netherlandish and English literature and art, where proverbs are used to decipher man's irrational conduct. In this same sense Chagall's Falling Angel (1923) is seen lost his direction during flight and destructs a city below. Aroch's abstract description of the angel does not allow us to over-extend our interpretation. The angel's isolation and precarious look is a sign though of