Ben-Ami Koller

Ben-Ami Koller is a French expressionist painter (Romanian by birth) born Petru Ben Ami Koller on May 14, 1948 in Oradea (Romania), died in Montreuil (Seine-Saint-Denis) on December 15, 2008. He was also a decorator of theater, carborundum and etching engraver, lithographer, sculptor and illustrator of books for young people.

Ben-Ami Koller was born into a family decimated by the Holocaust, his middle name, Ben Ami - "Son of my people" - was given to him because of his birth on the day of the independence of the State of Israel and he will choose to favor it, accompanied by a hyphen, in his artist signature. Awarded first prize in watercolor in an international competition organized by China at the age of seven, in 1967 he was a student of the Nicolae-Grigorescu Plastic Art Institute in Bucharest, from which he graduated in 1973. then created, at the National Theater in Bucharest, the sets and costumes for The Misunderstanding by Albert Camus, Prometheus in Chains by Aeschylus, Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller, The House of Bernarda Alba by Federico Garcia Lorca. This was also the time when he hitchhiked across Eastern Europe (Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria), self-financing through “odd jobs” here and there: “in these communist countries, he will remember, there were bistros where people came to eat and drink. I sat down, I took portraits of people, in exchange they invited me to spend the night and so I met a lot of people.”

He lived in Israel from 1973 to 1981, then in France from 1981 where a studio was lent to him in Paris by La Maison des artistes before he moved to Montreuil (Seine-Saint-Denis) in 1991, his workshop also becoming a place open to the teaching of visual arts: “there are many art school students and experienced painters,” says Françoise Christmann. who had the audacity to continue their steep path thanks to an exchange, advice, courses, internships, a visit to the workshop of the man whose works we admire as much as his communicative energy, vitality, benevolence and faith in human beings.

In 1983, Gérard Xuriguera places him in the new generation which has “engaged on the paths of the imagination, creating multiple breaches in the monolithic edifice generated by André Breton and his friends and giving birth to an art commonly called Fantasy where “convulsive beauty” often dominates but where “wonderful is always beautiful”.” In 1986, the traveling exhibition Figurations from the 60s to the present day offered one of its curators, Francis Parent, the opportunity to draw up a segmented panorama of contemporary figurative trends where he placed Ben-Ami Koller with Franta and Claude. Morini among the proponents of “a more formal way” which he distinguishes from “a softer figuration” (Philippe Bonnet, Gottfried Salzmann), “more expressionist” (John Christoforou, Maurice Rocher) or “more materialist” (Abraham Hadad, Roger-Edgar Gillet, Jean Revol).

Ben-Ami Koller was suddenly killed by a ruptured aneurysm in December 2008.