Walking over 10,000 little iron faces that covered the floor at Jewish Museum…
FALLEN LEAVES by Menashe Kadishman
“When we recall our century, there is only one historic event we can connect to this work: the Holocaust. Nevertheless, I have to emphasize: the work of Kadishman does not deal with the Holocaust, because the artist is working mainly with the material of his personal knowledge, his individual experiences and memories, but also because the Holocaust is unimaginable. The Holocaust is the most terrible collective memory of this century.”. Marc Schepps
Menashe Kadishman
I once met Menashe Kadishman at Biennale of São Paulo in the eighties. He was then one of the leaders in the Transvanguard movement, a revolution in painting after Pop Art, Geometric Abstraction, Hard-edge or Conceptual Art coming up until the seventies. One could see that his painting, which mainly depicted lambs painted in primary colors, was an ideal choice for him to be exposed to harsh, desert conditions of some parts of Israel. Indeed he always looked like a shepherd himself. Now I see him in a photo with his grand-daughter and found that he barely changed in spite of all these years, and that his work also continues to look for harsh conditions to show that the desert, this time about human race, is continually spreading. (Beto)
