Ovadia (Abdallah) Agassi was born in Baghdad to a family of rabbis who
engaged in commerce and clothes dying. He painted from a young age, but
his family objected to his engagement with art. In a moment of distress he
tried to end his life on the railway tracks, but a railroad worker saved
him. Hearing his story, the latter introduced him to his brother, Arie
Elias, a theater actor and later a movie star. Elias got Agassi a job in
the theater as set designer and kept in touch with him until his death.
At 22, Agassi began studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Baghdad, and
developed an interest in archaeology and in Babylonian, Assyrian, and
Egyptian civilizations. In 1950 he immigrated to Israel and worked in a
sign design shop.

- The work -
Agassi lived alone in a small one-bedroom rooftop apartment on Gordon
Street, Tel Aviv, where he painted in utter solitude, virtually detached
from the art world. He developed a unique technique of relief painting
in oils: sprinkling large quantities of white paint, he created f igures
and (biblical) texts, and months later, when the paint dried, he colored
it with monochromatic hues, usually red, orange, or yellow. The biblical
texts often take over the entire painterly surface, leaving no areas of
bare canvas, threatening to cover even the images. One may liken them to
incessant muttering, a troubling, unsettling noise. Agassi left behind
about 100 works, each created over a long period of time. In his lifetime
he sold very few, only when he was on the verge of starvation.