In 1924, Nisselvich made aliyah to Palestine with his parents and his sister, while his older brother remained in the Soviet Union.

His teachers included the painter Shmuel Ben David, the enamel artist Aaron Shaul Schur, and Jacob Eisenberg, in whose workshops he made ornamental ceramic tiles, for signs, among other things.

On the death of his father in 1932, Aroch erected a tombstone in the Trumpeldor Cemetery and engraved on it a poem by David Shimoni, his teacher at Gymnasia Herzlia.

In this work, and in others from this period, Aroch used the emphasis on the horizontal and vertical lines of the painting to divide the composition in a nearly geometrical and flat manner.

At the beginning of the decade Aroch painted a series of scenes of Zichron Yaakov and Haifa, in which he lived off and on from 1942 to 1946, while he served in the British army.

In addition, he designed uniforms for the first Lahakat Tsahal (the national Military Band of what was then the Land of Israel), which gave its first programs in 1942 and 1943.

When he participated in the “Exhibition of the Eight” that was held in December 1942 in the “Habima” building, Haim Gamzu remarked on his use of color, influenced by Van Gogh,[5] and was awarded the Meir Dizengoff Prize for a Young Artist by the Tel Aviv municipality.

After Aroch's release from the army in 1946, the couple moved to 120 Hayarkon Street in Tel Aviv, where he opened a studio in the small yard attached to their house.

Between 1960 and 1962 he began to produce his most significant body of work, which differed from the style of Israeli painting of the other members of “New Horizons” in everything connected to the inclusion of extra-artistic symbolic images.

One of the things that motivated this burst of creativity was Aroch's exposure to exhibitions of the contemporary art of that period that were held in the Stockholm City Museum during those years.

Among others, in 1962 Aroch attended an exhibition of the works of “Pop Art” artists, including Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns.

He established a professional contact with Bertha Urdang, director of the Rina Gallery, Jerusalem, who mounted an exhibition of his works during this year.

While participating in a meeting in Rome, as part of his job with the Foreign Ministry, he acquired the concept of using "Panda" oil pastel chalk, and started to work on a large body of work using this technique, some of them on reproductions and magazine pages (Gideon Efrat states that it was Aroch who introduced the term “Panda” into Hebrew as the generic term for this kind of pastel chalk).

In 1966 Masada Gallery in Tel Aviv held an exhibition of 23 of his Panda color drawings, organized by Raffi Lavie.

These works, such as the “Jewish Motif” (1961), “Arch in Blue-Purple” (1961), or “The Creation, Sarajevo Haggadah” (1966), exhibit abstract symbols of metaphysical significance.

In his works "The High Commissioner" (1966) and "Agripas Street" (1964), Aroch created his most typical combination of “concrete” local perceptions and international “Pop Art”.

In "The High Commissioner,” which continues his interest in these symbols, Aroch used additional iconographic elements, based on the history of Western art, which were destined to show up in his later works as well.

Instead of emphasizing the formalistic aspect, art critics began to focus on the contents of Aroch's works, including the elements from Jewish tradition.

In her article “Agrippa versus Nimrod” (1988), Sarah Breitberg-Semel presented Aroch's work as a model for the design of a new Israeli concept.

In her article she attacked the canonical concept in the research literature on the history of Israeli art, with regard to “Nimrod” (1939) by Itzhak Danziger, that saw in it the exclusive representative of Jewish nationalism.

[10] Arie Aroch, in spite of the fact that he was a member of “New Horizons,” offered in his works an alternative to “lyrical abstraction.” Instead of formless abstraction, he suggested concentrating on forms; instead of objectivity, basing the creation on personal handwriting; instead of professionalism, impoverishment of process – using non-traditional techniques to give birth to forms; instead of identifying with French abstract art – citing and using images that belong to various artistic concepts.

Arie Aroch influenced young artists more by his thoughts, by his way of combining different images with each other in his paintings, by the apparently meaningless lack of pathos that characterizes his work, by his techniques (erasures, engravings, doodles).