Menashe Kadishman: Urban | Nature

The 1970s were an experimental and groundbreaking period in the career of Menashe Kadishman (1932–2015), one of Israel’s most prominent and popular artists.

At the beginning of that decade, Kadishman started using telephone directories as a platform for his artworks. In an almost obsessive act of covering and uncovering, he transformed pages from phone books into vivid, emotional spaces filled with colors and forms evoking landscapes or cardiograms. He created hundreds of these abstract drawings, disrupting the rigid, alienating order of the urban grid.

Alongside his works on phone books, Kadishman also turned to artistic acts that intervene directly in nature and the landscape. “I wanted to work with the Creator’s forest, the organic forest, and incorporate into it ... forms that clash with nature,” he explained.

From drawings on the pages of phone books to interventions in urban nature, this exhibition offers a glimpse into a lesser-known chapter in Kadishman’s oeuvre. Fusing the city with nature, the works on show deal with the relationship between the artistic act, daily life, and the forces of nature – elements that remained at the heart of his artistic practice throughout his life.

Mounting the Laundry Forest installation

The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, 1975

Photo: Reuven Milon, Jerusalem

Yellow Tree, 1974

Silkscreen on paper, 61 x 91 cm

Gift of the artist

Photo: © The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, by Elie Posner

Untitled, in honor of the Israel Museum’s tenth anniversary, 1975

Offset lithograph, photocopy, graphite, 75.1 x 55.7 cm

Gift of the artist

Photo: © The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, by Elie Posner

 

Page from telephone directory, 1982–83

Silkscreen on paper, 100 x 70 cm

Gift of the artist’s friends

© The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, by Elie Posner