BROWN, AIKA

BROWN, AIKA (1937–1964), Israeli painter. Brown was born in Tel Aviv, and studied graphics at the Bezalel School of Art, Jerusalem. He lived in Paris from 1959 to 1963, and after a short stay in Israel returned to France where he was killed in a car accident. Brown's early paintings were abstract, with intense colors and brushstrokes, but the whole composition suggests concrete images such as landscapes, as in his Sun over Houses (1959). Shortly after arriving in Paris, however, he produced his first assemblages, which showed a drastic change in his work, attitude, and place, and which reflected new means of expression, new style, and new materials. Torn sacks, hammers, screws, pieces of wood, and ropes were assembled into dramatic compositions, revealing a new reality which he was striving to obtain. Employing the pieces of junk which cluttered his studio as legitimate art material, he endowed them with a new expressive reality, at the same time painting them as objects of everyday use. Brown most frequently employed dolls to represent anonymous figures. A Memorial Exhibition of his work was held at the Israel Museum in 1965. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: Y. Fischer, Ariel Brown 1937–1964 (1967). (Judith Spitzer)