Aviva Uri was an influential Israeli artist. Born in Safed, she studied painting with David Hendler, with whom she later lived. During the 1950s she was influenced by abstraction, surrealism, and Chinese and Japanese drawing. In 1952, she received the Dizengoff Prize and in 1957 she exhibited her work at the Tel Aviv Museum. She was appreciated for her abstract scribbles that expressed anxiety and distress. In the 1960s she was involved in exhibitions of the Ten Plus group and returned to painting to express social and anti-war protest. The feeling of mourning in her works grew in the 1980s, with the Lebanon War and the death of David Hendler. She continued to innovate and influence other artists until her death in 1989.
