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Hanna BEN DOV (1919-2009)

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Hanna BEN DOV (1919-2009)
17 Indian inks on paper
Signed
Dimensions from 9.5 x 11 cm to 40 x 50 cm

Daughter of the famous photographer and film pioneer Yaakov Ben-Dov, Hannah Ben-Dov (1919 - 2009) is an Israeli artist born in Jerusalem. After studying in London, she moved to Paris in the late 1940s to further her training with Brancusi, where she held her first exhibition in 1948.
Her oil paintings, which seem to allow great freedom of composition, are in fact the result of long reflection and patient maturation. A close associate of Joan Mitchell, Hannah Ben-Dov's work is part of the lyrical abstraction movement. Hanna Ben-Dov's inks are part of an aesthetic lineage that can be compared to that of Tal Coat, Jean Degottex and Zao Wou-Ki, with their free gesturality.

In 1999, Jacques Busse wrote:
"His business as a painter is light - but light trapped in the thousand prisms of nature, light turned into color. Ben-Dov possesses all colors, their infinite modulations, from the darkest to the lightest, and it is these colors, juxtaposed, superimposed or opposed, that are also the very form of his painting."
Settling regularly in Labeaume, Ardèche, where she led a simple life, she joined the post-war Parisian scene and exhibited at the major salons - Salon d'Automne, Salon de la Jeune Peinture, Réalités Nouvelles - from the late 1950s to the 1980s.

Today, her work can be found in the collections of the Centre Pompidou, the Musée d'Art Moderne in Paris, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art and the Rockefeller Collection in New York. She has been the subject of monographic exhibitions, notably at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Reims (1984) and the Musée Alphonse Daudet in Saint Alban-Auriolles (2013). Like the artists David Yan-Barr and Jacques Yankel, she set up a studio in the village of Labeaume, in the Ardèche region, where she stayed regularly and rarely left, leading a simple lifestyle. She died in 2009 at the age of 90, and is buried in the Père-Lachaise cemetery. Her studio collection has been bequeathed to Labeaume Town Hall by her heirs.