Curator: Amichai Chasson | Assistant Curator: Rika Grinfeld Barnea
Beit Avi Chai presents the exhibition “You Must Choose Life – That is Art,” which includes dozens of selected works from the estate of the Israel Prize for Painting-winning artist Pinchas Litvinovsky, one of the founding fathers of Israeli art and a prolific Jerusalem painter, whose works are seeing the light of day for the first time in 30 years. The extensive exhibition spread over the three floors of Beit Avi Chai showcases the varied styles Litvinovsky worked with – from enchanted orientalism through Jewish themes and portraits of elected officials to abstract and diverse color works.
Litvinovsky was not part of any artistic group; he rarely exhibited his works and never dated or named them. Apart from portraiture, he usually avoided selling his pieces. After his death, the painter’s estate numbered over 6,000 works, held in his studio in Jerusalem. However, the estate encountered various hardships over the years, culminating in a terrible destruction by the painter’s grandson, which reduced the thousands of works to only a few hundred. The exhibition “You Must Choose Life – That is Art” highlights the best of the remaining pieces, showcasing various playful, sensual, and spiritual artistic facets of Pinchas Litvinovsky’s legacy.
The exhibition will feature an interactive stand, “Make yourself a Litvinovsky AI portrait,” where visitors can create their own Litvinovsky-style portrait using AI (Design: Alon Chitayat, software development: Avinoam Cooper).
