Menashe Kadishman

Throughout his long career, Menashe Kadishman produced a wide range of works redolent with Biblical themes, informed by the long history of his country and inspired by his belief that “art grows from feelings and not rational calculations alone.” In his early, more modernist sculptural works, Kadishman focused on form, tension, and balance; later he would develop a more expressive style. He represented Israel in the 1978 Venice Biennale, where he stood in the middle of a room of live sheep tinting their fleece blue, referencing his work as a shepherd on a kibbutz. Poetically merging man and nature, the industrial and the organic, and painting and sculpture in his works, he produces painterly sculptures and sculptural paintings full of powerful emotion.