Eli Content - Large 80s OP-ART pastel chalk on paper signed "yellow circles". - Sold

• Content was born in the middle of World War II. His parents married in 1942 at the Hollandsche Schouwburg in Amsterdam and fled the same year. They ended up in Switzerland and in 1943, in the town of Vevey, Eli Content was born there. After the war, the destitute Content family would settle in Hilversum.

As a teenager, Content worked as a ship's cook before emigrating to Israel at the age of eighteen. He wanted to escape the post-war anti-Semitism in the Netherlands. However, after three years he returned homesick and studied for a year at the Ateliers '63 in Haarlem (later De Ateliers) in the 1970s. Apart from that, Content was self-taught. In 1976 he made his debut at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and six years later he started working as a teacher at the art academy in Kampen, where he remained affiliated until 2005. Content saw painting as an intellectual activity: reading and seeing a lot was important to make art yourself. He admired artists such as Pablo Picasso and Karel Appel for their unconventional approach and he loved poetry and music: on the edges of his canvases he scribbled the names of his favorite jazz musicians and songs. In Amsterdam Content was not only known as a painter, but also for his poetry. Every few weeks for more than forty years, Content stamped a poem he selected on a large piece of paper and hung it in front of his window on the Weesperzijde. At the end of 2019, the first major retrospective of Content's work opened in the Jewish Historical Museum. So much I gazed on beauty showed walls covered with lush paintings and drawings in a chronological manner. Here it was clearly visible how Content, over the course of his career, was able to shape the wildness of Creation in an abstract manner as well as with pasty human figures. As if he used the smithereens from his youth as building blocks to illustrate creation.