Morning Light (Sheep and Sheep)
1991-1999Ulrich Schneider
Morning Light (Sheep and Sheep) is one of Menashe Kadishman's lyrical installations: a flock of twenty animals huddles together in the first warming rays of a summer's morning and shakes the morning dew from its fleece. A peaceful pastoral scene.
The almost life-sized sheep's heads are cut out of sheet steel, while the still crouching bodies, some of them appearing to be in the process of rising slowly and stiffly to their legs, are made of a few twists of strengthened wire. The atmospheric effect of
Mediterranean sunlight is cunningly evoked with no more than fragments of mirrors placed here and there in the animals' bodies. Thus the animals sense the coming day in all their innocence and peacefulness.
Time and again since 1991, Morning Light was shown in the most suitable setting in 1994, when it was installed against the bucolic backdrop of the Fattoria di Celle, near Pistoia, in ltaly, in the art collector and patron Giuliano Gori's sculpture park. Yet
the implications of the mirrored light also make it function very convincingly in a museum environment. Morning Light can be said to be a masterpiece of Kadishman's lifelong exploration of the theme of the sheep as a metaphor of the innocence and vulnerability of animals.