This biography from the Archives of AskART:
| Please note: Artists not classified as American in our database may have limited biographical data
compared to the extensive information about American artists.
 The painter Avraham Binder inherited his artistic
genes from his father and grandfather, and possibly from earlier ancestors,
who were all "binders", that is to say, bookbinders - hence the name.
They were true masters of their craft, as witnessed by a certificate of
excellence in artistic bookbinding - still in Avraham Binder's possession
- awarded to his father in 1910. The occasion was an exhibit of industrial
achievements and the carious crafts of Czarist Russia. The artist recalls
that his grandfather, too, was a bookbinder - and an adherent of the Hasidic
Rabbi of Karlin. And so he would make a yearly pilgrimage on foot, from
his hometown Grodno to Karlin, to bind his Rabbi's books! The talmudic
tomes in the library of the Rabbi of Karlin boasted the most artistic
bindings.
These artistic inclinations in the family's forebears manifested themselves
in Avraham Binder, his sister Zila Binder and his daughter Yael, all of
whom became painters.
Avraham Binder was born in 1906 in Vilna. He began painting at an early
age and completed the prescribed studies in painting at the academy of arts
in his native city. Already upon graduation, at the commencement exhibition
of works submitted by the graduates, he was awarded a prize in recognition
of his talents.
The Binder family immigrated to Palestine at the end of the 1920's. Avraham's
father opened a bookbinding workshop in Tel-Aviv, while the son turned
to painting. Many of his canvases - portraits, landscapes - are in the
possession of dozens of collectors. He has had many exhibitions in Israeli
galleries as well as museums - in particular, the Tel-Aviv Museum of Art.
He has also exhibited abroad, especially in the United States.
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. Those squares and rectangles reflect, perhaps,
impressions of a childhood spent among books which were scattered about
the home and workshop of his father, the bookbinder. These shapes, no
doubt, had their influence upon the artist whose first youthful impressions
were - books.
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 inventing space, too - creates figurative effects in the
artist's treatment.
Avraham 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 explanation. 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 out present-day
architecture with its pervasive angularity. Made up as they are 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.
Here and there, Binder also introduces the human element into these paintings. He lives and
breathes the atmosphere of his surroundings, deeply experiencing the sea and the shore of
Tel-Aviv that confront him day after day, and which he has transferred to his canvases, as
metaphors in paint, throughout the life. More recently, he has created a new series of
shore-and-seascapes, in tones ranging from brown to blue. ochre, violet and pale
yellow - marvelous views of the sea and of figures enlivening its shore. In yet another
series, featuring nearly the same range of hues, he lets us view, through his eyes, the
Carmel Market in Tel-Aviv, or the city's coffee houses with their crowds of people, heads
bunched together as if in search of human closeness, with the windows looking in upon them. He
has also done large paintings of Jerusalem - not the Jerusalem of gloom and holiness, but a
Jerusalem in 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.
We have here a painter who, until the end of his life, was still in his
full creative powers, and who continued to add to his impressive storehouse
of artistic works. Hundreds of his paintings grace the homes of collectors
in Israel and throughout the world, or hang in his private collection; they
include Israel landscapes and, most importantly, cityscapes; an exquisite
series of wild flowers; many portrait paintings; experimental wood sculptures;
murals painted on wood panels; reliefs…, etc. All these are testimony to
an artist who refuses to rest on his laurels, who forever reaches out to
try his hand at new challenges, strikes out in novel directions, discovers
innovative techniques, and experiments in all the dimensions of the plastic
arts.
Avraham Binder's insatiable curiosity advanced him into the front ranks
of our nation's artists.
Source:
http://www.abinder.com/bio.shtml
| |
Biography from Kamp Gallery, Inc.:
| Please note: Artists not classified as American in our database may have limited biographical data
compared to the extensive information about American artists.
Avraham Binder was born in 1906 in Vilna, Poland. He began painting at an early age and completed the prescribed studies in painting at the Academy of Arts in his native city.
Already upon graduation, at the commencement exhibition of works submitted by the graduates, he was awarded a prize in recognition of his talents. Many of his canvases-portraits, landscapes-are in the possession of dozens of collectors.
He has had many exhibitions in Israeli galleries as well as museums-in particular, the Tel-Aviv Museum of Art. He has also exhibited abroad, especially in the United States. |
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