What's On

Ben Uri is honoured and delighted to have been invited to be the 2023 museum partner at the 2023 London Art Fair. This prestigious event is being held at the business design centre in Islington between 18 and 22nd of January 2023.

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Presented by Emeritus Professor Richard Cohen of the Hebrew University, Jerusalem and Associate Professor Mirjam Rajner of Bar-Ilan University, Tel Aviv and authors of the newly published survey on Hirszenberg of the same title.

This book reveals the innermost turmoil of Polish born artist, Samuel Hirszenberg’s struggle to juggle not only the contradiction of traditionalism and modernism and the representation of his fellow Jews in a changing world but also often intense financial and family challenges. It traces his choices particularly between Paris and Jerusalem where in 1907 he arrived with a hope to create modern Jewish art using contemporary language and practice.  

Ben Uri is proud to have one of  Hirszenberg’s great masterpieces ’Sabbath Rest’ in our collection.

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Ben Uri is delighted to be one of the National Gallery’s nine regional collection partners for the virtual exhibition Fruits of the Spirit pairing Ben Uri’s Mornington Crescent, Summer Morning II by Frank Auerbach with the National Gallery’s Sunflowers by Vincent van Gogh to explore the ‘fruit’ of Joy.

The current exhibition explores the concept of Joy through a selection of artworks from the Ben Uri Collection asking whether Joy is to be found in home (Frank Auerbach), in family (Dora Holzhandler, Bernard Meninsky), in love (Yaki Assayag, Chana Kowalska), in the shimmering heat of a summer’s day (Auerbach, Arthur Segal), in a vibrant landscape (Auerbach, Philip Sutton), in a bold still-life (Sutton, Tomalin), in celebration (Dancing Figures) or even the act of dance itself (Feibusch, Levy, Bakst). Is it achieved through spirituality (Holzhandler) or a joyous religious festival (Levy)?

More information to follow soon. 

Spending time with a loved one who lives on their own or in a care setting is hugely important as loneliness is the biggest single stimulant of dementia. Spending time actually doing something together is a huge bonus as it is the doing something together that keeps the brain fertile and aware - something like art?!

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Ben Uri had a long and fruitful relationship with the German emigre artist Hans Feibusch. He escaped Nazi tyranny in 1933 joining his British born fiance in London.

He exhibited first at Ben Uri in 1934. His work was designated ‘Degenerate’ by the Nazis in 1937 and included in the infamous exhibition in Munich. He lived until his 100th year and his life is as interesting as his art.

Explore the exhibition here

Dekk (née Dorothea Karoline Fuhrmann) was born into a Jewish family in Brno, Moravia Austria-Hungary (subsequently Czechoslovakia, now Czech Republic) in 1917 and studied at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Vienna (1936–38). Following the Nazi annexation of Austria in 1938, she fled to London studying at the relocated Reimann School, specialising in graphic design. After the war she adopted the professional name 'Dekk' for design and advertising work for many notable clients, also working as 'Dorrit Dekk' as a painter and printmaker from 1982 onwards.

Find out more about her here

Theo Balden was born Otto Koehler in 1904 in Brazil and trained as a technical draughtsman in Berlin before studying at the Weimar Bauhaus from 1923–24, also working as a freelance artist. From 1928 he was an active member of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) and in 1929 joined the Association of Revolutionary Visual Artists of Germany; following the rise of Nazism and his arrest and detention in 1934, he escaped to Prague on a false passport under the name of Theo Balden. After the German invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1939, he fled to England and following internment in Canada; return to England, where he had some success as a sculptor before relocating to the German Democratic Republic in 1947.

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