Seer Shepherd (Ro’eh Ro’eh) / Gavriel Engel
With this festive exhibition the Engel Gallery is celebrating the sixth year of the Biennale in Jerusalem, we present a dual-layered exhibition on the subject of inalienable assets in Israeli art (in Hebrew: iron flock assets).
In the entrance floor of the gallery, sculptures of iron and bronze by Menashe Kadishman are displayed; Kadishman raised the shepherd’s staff and declared “I am the shepherd of Israeli art, and my creations are the Israeli art”. Indeed, Kadishman is the artist who best represents modern Israeli art and can even be considered the new Israeli-Jewish artist. His use of the lamb-ram, from his role as a shepherd and a sculptor, created a field of inquiry that renews the artistic discourse about our place as a people and the culture that guides us. In our past, the shepherd was the leader, whether it was Moses or King David, mythical figures who emerged from an understanding of the herd and its needs, becoming leaders of the people. Thus, also Kadishman, who presented at the Venice Biennale in the Israeli Pavilion in 1978 the first live lamb flock in the history of the Biennale, painted and marked them with sky blue paint, as if saying “I am the shepherd – the seer, this is Israeli art, it comes from the strength of the farseeing shepherd watching his flock.”
However, the lamb-ram is also the story of sacrifice, as depicted in our sources and as represented in sculptures, such as the Binding of Isaac at Tel Aviv University. The powerfully large iron sculpture, with its intricate rusted steel plates that at a certain light resemble blood, has the head of the ram placed above, as Isaac’s head either dead or reborn downward. The legs of the ram are replaced by the spread arms of Isaac, but his gaze is directed upwards to his savior – the ram. In this sculpture, the sacrificed figure is represented as the people of Israel and there is no ram to save them. Yet, the sculpture also symbolizes the purity and innocence of those who go as sheep to the slaughter. Kadishman knew how to navigate between the pleasant and the tragic, and between the soft and the hard. While the colorful paintings of Kadishman’s sheep made him the most identified artist with Israeli art, almost no Israeli cultural figure would not recognize “Kadishman’s sheep.” In contrast, his sculptures made of weathered iron, as well as his monumental sculptures like “Rising” in Habima Square or “Binding” at the entrance of the Tel Aviv Museum, are less associated with him. In his many exhibitions, Kadishman displayed his paintings of lambs scattered on the exhibition floor like a flock, as three-dimensional works standing in space, rather than a two-dimensional painting exhibition hanging on the wall, thus turning the paintings of the lambs into living bodies to move through and wander within, like a shepherd. Similarly, in Iron Flock & Assets, in order to experience the power of Kadishman’s creation, the viewer’s journey is not through paintings but through Kadishman’s sculptures as a flock, as the shepherd watches over the flock from a white base – the seer shepherd.