Sculpture and Drawings
from catalogue - Annely Juda Fine Aret gallery, 1992Mark Scheps
This exhibition is a culmination in the development of Menashe Kadishman's oeuvre, the first public manifestation of which was at the Venice Biennale of l978, and could be defined as a 'return to original sources.
At the end of the '50's, after an apprenticeship in London (with Anthony Caro in particular), and after remarkable success in constructive minimalism, followed by a conceptual phase which made Kadishman a master in the economy of means, he has now returned spectacularly to his primary origins, revealing his deep attachment to nature. An actual shepherd guarding his real flock, Kadishman the man puts himself on stage, becomes part of his work in a true natural environment. At the Biennale, the artist posed once again in precise as well as personal terms the problem of the relationship between art and life (and in this case, also that between the artist and his own works), a problem which has lost nothing of its topicality since Duchamp posed it in most radical terms at the beginning of the century.
Kadishman gained strength as a result of his not having been taken in by the game of the formal repetition of the act of appropriation of the real; instead, he considers this experience much more as a catharsis, from which a work is born with a mighty blast, deeply original, or, to be more precise, unique.
Paradoxically, his course passes first through painting, to which he devotes himself not only with abandonment, but also with a wonderful childlike openness, giving free rein to an overloaded creative energy which had been dormant during his conceptual and reductive period. This painting, free in appearance of any constraint, brings a new poetry of nature and is, nevertheless, disciplined by what one could call a 'Kadishmanian ethic'. This painting, deeply sensual and joyous, follows no rules or conventions. Again and again, he joyfully offers his heads of sheep to us; this does not return nature to us, but it does signify a feeling and even a morality. From there, Kadishman once again returns to his origins and rediscovers the strength of the myth. The head of a sheep is not merely a head of a sheep; it revitalizes in each work the strength of the myth, belonging to a cosmological genesis which defines the ancient relationship between man and the universe.
Beginning from intuitive, almost uncontrollable painting, Kadishman articulates his vocabulary and creates a mythological and vent personal language which originated in the depths of his memories and is nothing less than a passionate dialogue with codified myth like those of the Sacrifice of Isaac or Prometheus.
The myth is confronted with real life and the artist modifies it with his creative imagination and deep feeling for the human condition.
Having defined his discourse through painting, the path is open for a vigorous return to sculpture. It is not the fact that he left drawing and painting which allowed him the twists and turns of doubt and uncertainty, but rather that he rediscovered the resistance of material, the precision of the cut-out, and continued on to the essence of form until the myth transformed became a certainty, a vertical reality which is protected in actual space.
Now it is l982. Kadishman returns once again to monumentality in his cut-out metal pieces. To understand this process well, one has to talk about another constancy of his work. From the very beginning, Kadishman was driven by a constant urge to draw, regardless of where he might be at the time. He thinks with his hands; every moment he puts down his imaginative thoughts, perhaps because he is afraid they will be forgotten Drawing becomes a visual short-hand, a short-cut which does not take aesthetics into account. It is an insatiable, expressive urgency. During this creative process, Kadishman discovers the fundamental possibility of drawing, of creating with one line a form protected into space. Thereafter, he treats the sheet of metal like a simple sheet of paper.
In his maquettes/sculptures created from thin sheets of brass, he cuts forms and then folds them one way and the other so that they protect and sit in actual space. From there, the artist finds his real working method: from drawing to maquette to monumental sculpture. The simplicity of his method allows him to pass from drawing to cut-out, from the sheet of paper to the sheet of industrial metal, whose thickness is dictated by the necessity of statics. During the course of his continual research, Kadishman renounces the constructive tradition of welded sculpture and puts forward a strategy of stunning simplicity. In the factories where he makes his large pieces, he has learned that sheets of metal even with a thickness of several centimeters, can be cut, folded, moulded as though they were simple sheets of paper. It is with an exuberant pleasure that he uses the heavy and powerful machines to transform the small pencil drawings from hrs imagination into monumental sculpture.
Simple in appearance, the process is, in actuality, complex, because he imagines his forms and draws from his sculptures as a means of solving the problems that he has set for himself. This interaction between drawing a form on the one hand, and the material projection in space on the other, not only does not limit the creative force of the artist, but, on the contrary, it stimulates and inspires him to an additional imaginative dimension, which gives unexpected results imbued with essential poetry.
In this way, Kadishman once again tirelessly takes up the theme of negative-positive with all its variants. To describe them either in their entirety or in part would be too fastidious; it is, therefore, better to limit oneself to a few more general comments. As much as a drawing is always dependent upon his support, Kadishman's sculpture is intimately related to the sheet of metal from which the form has been taken or cut On the other hand, the operation is simple, direct, precise and readable. There is no artificiality, no secrecy, no illusion.
The same attitude is found in the treatment of his great themes; Birth, Sacrifice, Suffering and Death. The artist eliminates the anecdotal from his themes, removes the historical context and places it at the level of a universal phenomenon. But beyond the cycle of suffering, which travels between birth and death, Kadishman is deeply attached to life, and his work expresses all the joy of living; he exudes a radiant energy full of a warm feeling for nature. Rather than as pessimistic, one could describe his work as optimistic, vital. Kadishman creates in doubt, but also in joy, and from refinement to refinement, he creates his own universe, where the myth is no longer a sacred but a poetic reality. Because he finds the world impossible to live in, Kadishman has re-invented it within his imagination, cut from metal sheets and erected as a fundamental reality.
Marc Scheps, 1992
Director, Ludwig Museum, Cologne