Menashe Kadishman was born in Tel Aviv, British Mandate Palestine (now Israel) in 1932. After studying in Israel, he moved to London in 1959, studying sculpture at St Martin’s School of Art under Anthony Caro and later at the Slade School of Art with Reg Butler. During this period, he embraced abstraction, replacing traditional materials with aluminium, glass, and steel, and experimented with balance and suspension in sculpture. He returned to Israel in 1972. Menashe Kadishman died in Tel Aviv, Israel on 8 May 2015.
Sculptor Menashe Kadishman was born on 21 August 1932 in Tel Aviv, British Mandate Palestine (now Israel). His father was a sculptor and industrial worker, while his mother was a teacher and painter. When Kadishman was just 15, his father died, prompting him to leave school to help support his family. Despite these challenges, he found time to nurture his artistic talent, initially studying painting with Aharon Avni, before shifting to sculpture under Moshe Sternschuss at the Avni Institute of Art and Design in Tel Aviv. From 1950–53, he served in the Nahal infantry brigade, where his duties included working as a shepherd on kibbutzim near Israel’s northern borders. This experience had a lasting influence on his artistic practice, particularly his enduring association with sheep as a recurring motif in his work. In 1954, he continued his training under Rudi Lehmann in Jerusalem, further developing his sculptural technique. Kadishman’s experiences during the 1956 Sinai Campaign profoundly influenced his later work. A photograph by Yasha Agor, depicting a dog eating a dead soldier in Sinai deeply resonated with his own memories of war, inspiring a series of drawings and sculptures that grappled with themes of violence,, mourning, and the fragility of life. His drawings from this series, created in 1985, are now held in the British Museum, London.
In 1959, Kadishman moved to London, England to pursue further studies, enrolling first at St Martin’s School of Art, where he studied under Anthony Caro, and later at the Slade School of Art with Reg Butler. His time in Britain coincided with a period of transformation in sculpture, as artists moved away from figurative traditions towards abstraction and industrial materials, a shift Kadishman embraced by replacing conventional materials, like bronze and stone, with aluminium, glass, and steel (artist’s website). His early works explored balance and suspension, challenging perceptions of weight and gravity. Pieces such as Suspense (1966) and Segments (1968) exemplified his engagement with minimalism and the manipulation of space, often incorporating glass to integrate the surrounding environment into the sculpture.
Despite his artistic progress, Kadishman struggled as a foreign artist in Britain, facing exclusion from official exhibitions due to his lack of a British passport. This isolation, however, strengthened his artistic independence, allowing him to develop a distinctive style free from external constraints. In 1965, he held his first solo exhibition at London’s Grosvenor Gallery, curated by the critic, Charles Spencer. In 1966, he contributed to Ben Uri’s Fiftieth Anniversary Special Exhibition. His reputation grew internationally when he won first prize for sculpture at the 5th Paris Biennale in 1967 and participated in Documenta 4 in Kassel, West Germany, the following year. While engaging with British sculpture, Kadishman also explored the relationship between art and nature, leading to both influence and divergence from the work of his tutor, Anthony Caro, and from David Smith. While Caro’s work was defined by its formal syntax, Kadishman increasingly sought to infuse sculpture with narrative and personal meaning. His interest in form and structure remained, but he gradually moved away from Caro’s purely abstract approach, choosing instead to create works that engaged with human emotion, history, and identity (Hildebrandt 2012). During his time in Britain, Kadishman also explored the relationship between art and nature. His environmental installations, such as The Forest (Montevideo, 1969; New York Central Park, 1970; Krefeld, Germany, 1972), blended man-made elements with natural landscapes.
In 1972, Kadishman returned to Israel, shifting his focus toward narrative and symbolism, while continuing large-scale sculpture. He explored biblical and historical themes, gaining recognition at the 1978 Venice Biennale with Sheep Project: Nature as Art and Art as Nature, where he transformed the Israeli Pavilion into a pen of live sheep marked with blue paint, reinforcing the motif he would revisit in thousands of works. In the 1980s, he examined sacrifice and loss, particularly in his depictions of the Binding of Isaac, portraying Isaac as a victim rather than a spared child, while the ram remained a powerful presence. In the early 1990s he showed with Annely Juda in London, a gallery founded by the epnymous German refugee.His Shalechet (Fallen Leaves) installation, first exhibited in 1997 and later made permanent at the Jewish Museum in Berlin, featured thousands of iron-cut faces spread across the floor, evoking themes of grief and remembrance. In his later years, he remained prolific, expanding his themes of sacrifice, memory, and human experience. His monumental public sculptures became central to many urban landscapes, and he introduced other animal imagery, such as donkeys and birds, further enriching his symbolic language.
A major figure in Israeli and international art, he received numerous accolades, including the Israel Prize for sculpture in 1995. In 2001 and 2006 he featured in Ben Uri's International Jewish Artist of the Year Award (IJAYA). Menashe KAdishman died in Tel Aviv, Israel on 8 May 2015. In the UK public domain, his work is represented in the Tate and British Museum collections.
Irene Iacono