Articles
‘The Birth’ by Mordechai Omer
Towards the late l980s, Kadishman returned to sculpture and painting, where a naturalistic imagery gained new significance and took on a very important dimension in his work.The Birth series appeared toward the end of the I980s. It represents the “Great Mother” who gives life and, at the same time, symbolizes the taking of life. These works are among the most expressive in Kadishman’s oeuvre of that period. In the Birth Series, the winding line curves in and out, as if trying to express in iron the pangs of birth and the bursting forth of the new born into the world. The pain and anxiety of the mother inherent in the birth process, together with the life-force of the newborn infant, intertwine. Kadishman is perhaps the only artist to relate to the sentence “in sorrow shall you bear children”. In an astonishing manner Kadishman connects the maternal fate with mother topic, one to which the artist has devoted many works in sculpture and painting – “the binding of Isaac”. In his unique treatment of this subject, the artist accords Sarah, the mother, a role of no less importance than of the
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‘The Sacrifice of Isaac’ by Christine Tacke
The state of Israel has never yet found peace since its foundation. Young soldiers still die in the struggle for the continued existence of their country.When the son of Maneshe Kadishman was conscripted for military service, his father experienced the anxiety of all fathers for the life of their sons. The inner conflict between fulfillment of a duty towards the state, the people or the community on the one hand and individual well—being on the other hand was already portrayed in the biblical story of lsaac’s sacrifice. In relation to this image with which he was particularly familiar, because he and his son stood as models in 1973 for the sculpture Isaacs Sacrifice by George Segal (1), he now faced his own acute personal situation. Through the sublimation as art he was able to generalize his personal problem to the extent that it is now comprehensible for any observer or at least opens his mind to think about solutions of his own.
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‘Shalechet’ by arturo Schwartz
Menashe Kadishman’s latest sculpture-environment, “Shalechet” (Fallen Leaves) is constituted by a very large number of heavy, circular-shaped, iron disks forged into the semblance of a frantic screaming face, the expression of which immediately calls to mind the ghostly visage seen in Eduard Munch’ painting The Scream, 1893.The disks are scattered over almost the whole surface of the gallery floor and the visitor is asked to tread them. This difficult walking exercise provokes a profound feeling of uneasiness since not only is it hard to keep one’s balance, one is also unconsciously reluctant to trample a work of art which, in addition, represents such painful feelings.I strongly suspect that Kadishman’s request to walk over his work is motivated – whether knowingly or not – by his desire to make us experience an uneasiness which is a metaphor for the emotional turmoil that seizes a concerned person when reminded of the tragedy of the Shoah.
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‘Draw Me a Sheep’ by Sara Breitberg-Semel
Something predictable has happened to painting. During the last fifteen years it has been regarded as the unnecessary, heavy-handed, impure art form-the flesh that covers the skeleton. The interest lay in the skeleton, not in the flesh.
It was Conceptual Art that left painting out, its motto being `art as idea’, denoting on the one hand rejection of manual work, and on the other focusing on presentation of an idea through necessary, barely sufficient, i.e., minimal, means. Drawing, which was a popular medium during the Conceptual Art period, was presented as a direct and minimal technique for the concretization of an idea. Art products were described in an apologetic tone as documenting an idea whose physical existence was merely temporary (the `Running Fence’ drawings of Christo, Kadishman’s painted tree prints, and photographs of earth works). In that atmosphere, painting was rejected as a medium in which the quality of an artwork is determined by the actual execution rather than by the idea behind it. Colour was rejected as an unnecessary ornamentation which overshadowed the idea, as opposed to the black-and-white drawing which illuminated thought. The works of art characteristic of the period whose end-or at least the end of its militant phase-we are witnessing, were temporary projects, performances, black-and-white drawings, meager painting, conceptual minimal sculpture, video art, etc.
Fifteen lean years have generated thirst. And today, he who is thirsty seeks
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‘Sculptures’ by Amnon Barzel
The Sacrifice sculptures were born with Kadishman’s live sheep project at the 1978 Venice Biennale. Now, in1999, countless heads of youths are laid out before us.
Hundreds of thousands who fell in battle, millions who were massacred. Women and children in the midst of wars of nations that rise up against one another, always by command of governments whose power becomes godlike when they decide on the fate of the living. Since the earliest phases of his oeuvre, Kadishman has persistently exposed the injustice of any decision to rise up and murder the other: already in the sixties he created an expression for these pains in sharp, broken glass panels which wound the eye that looks on them, and are buried in acute-angled pits in graves or trenches of soldiers in the battlefield.
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‘Menashe Kadishman’ by Edward E Fry
In the collective mind of the art world of New York, and thus of the United States, Menashe Kadishman securely occupies a distinguished position defined by his sculpture of the late 60’s and early l970’s, in which he absorbed the precepts of Anthony Caro and his circle and then transformed them into a phenomenological drama of levitation, of unexpected combinations of metal and glass, and of minimal forms which soon broke away into nature from the asceticism of the urban cultural world. But during this entire earlier phase of his work Kadishman also led another life within himself nourished by his youth in Israel and by his sense of the moral dimensions of existence, of the sacredness of humanity within a secular world ringed with death. The tension between these two worlds, one the narrow formalit-phenomenological orthodoxy of a dying modernism, the other of a compassionate moral imagination engendered by man’s historical condition, could only lead to a convulsive transfiguration of his art.
This rebirth would carry Kadishman first away from art into life and then, through countless drawings, back into art again, first to painting and then, finally to a pictorially inflected sculpture. But this new sculpture by Kadishman is no longer the sculpture of modernism, despite the artists absorption of the entire modern plastic tradition; for the sculptural tradition of modernism was the record of private, individual, aesthetic and subjective experience which, when transplanted into public space, carried its homelessness and social alienation with it and was at peace with its surroundings only within the bourgeois subjectivity of the modern art museum or the secluded garden.
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‘Localism’ by Dan Miron
Menashe Kadishman is one of the few Israeli artists who succeeded in reaching out to an international audience. His artistic vision, however; is firmly rooted in his Israeli origins: the landscape of Israel, on the one hand, and the saga of his patents, the Zionist pioneers who fled persecution in Europe and dreamt of the creation of a just, non-alienated, new Jewish society on the other hand. The two were to him intertwined and all but unified. The Jewish cultural renaissance, triggered and informed by Zionist aspirations, was driven by an overwhelming need to complement and counterbalance traditional Jewish culture, with its professed orientation toward time and text, by a culture oriented toward space and nature.
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‘Art and Nature’ by Mordechai Omer
Menashe Kadishman was born in Tel Aviv in 1932, and began his artistic career in the early sixties as a minimalist sculptor in London. He continued on to become a pioneer of conceptual art in the late sixties. His work from this period was well-represented at the 1971-72 show at the Haus Lange Museum in Krefeld.
An important international indication of the artist’s need to bring Nature back into the museum halls was made by Kadishman at the1978 Venice Biennale in his appearance as a “shepherd” with live sheep.
The minimalist artworks in earth and glass which Kadishman produced in those
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‘Forward’ by Ulrich Schneider
Menashe Kadishman is one of Israe’s most celebrated artists, whose works enjoy an excellent international reputation. Exhibitions in his homeland, in the United States, in many European countries and recently also in Japan, China and Thailand have been showing his opus time and again and convincingly ever since the sixties. Participation in several editions of theVenice Biennale and the Kassel Documenta demonstrate the innovative strength he applies to combining art with nature. His works are owned by many museums all over the world and by several private collectors.
At sixty-seven years of age a member of the middle generation of Israeli artists, Menashe Kadishman has worked with breathtaking creativity throughout his life.
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Menashe Kadishman by Arturo Schwartz
On a bright May morning of 1993 Ofer Lellouche told me, “you must meet Menashe Kadishman, you will like him, he is a Flabelaisian personage, and one of our most important sculptors.” At the time my knowledge of lsraeli art was very poor, I remembered his performance at the Venice Biennial of course, but was not familiar with his further developments. I asked: “what kind of sculpture does he make now?” Lellouche’s Iapidary answer perfectly epitomized the personage, with a smile: “He sculpts as a painter and he paints as a sculptor.” The appointment was made for the following day in his Tel Aviv studio. Lellouche, my wife Rita and I arrived a few moments before the set time and we waited for him at the top of the staircase. A big – really big – man appeared, dressed as always in his uniform: a white shirt floating over white shorts, and holding three brightly colored balloons, in the shape of a mermaid and two Disney characters, flying high above him. He climbed the stairs with an agility that contradicted his weight.
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