Born into a family of Ukrainian Zionist and socialist refugees who settled in Palestine in 1920, Aviva Uri lost her mother shortly after her birth. This was a decisive event for the artist’s future work, who never ceased oscillating between creation and destruction, life and chaos, birth and death (Little Earth, 1985). Artist David Hendler – whom she married in 1941 – introduced her to drawing, which became her exclusive media. The at times coloured line played a central role in her spirited compositions mixing mysterious inscriptions and automatic writings, simultaneously evoking Kabbalistic symbols and Zen calligraphy. In its bare simplicity, this pure line expresses the trace of absence and want while revealing the bubbling of life in gestation (Parallels in the Judean Hills, 1961). Inventing her own signs in her cosmic works that at times recall the universe of American Cy Twombly, she explored the links between drawing and writing while insisting on the vitality of gesture and the fleetingness of phenomena (Composition, Haifa, 1970).

Sadness, anxiety and death were her favoured themes, which she also explored in poetry. She exhibited for the first time in Tel-Aviv-Jaffa at the gallery Katz in 1949. In 1952 she participated in various group exhibitions and received the prestigious Dizengoff Prize given to an Israeli artist each year. Her fame in Israel grew considerably with a major exhibition of her drawings at the Tel Aviv-Jaffa Museum in 1957. In 1959, the director of the museum, Eugen Kolb, chose her to represent Israel at the First Biennial of Young Artists in Paris. While continuing to exhibit in her country, she became known on the international scene with two solo exhibitions in 1984, at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf. The Ein Harod Museum of Art in Israel dedicated a posthumous retrospective to her in 2002.