The Israel Museum is showing the "Urban Nature" collection, curated by Amitai Mendelsohn with assistance from Mika Nachtailer, and the exhibition puts lesser-known works by Menashe Kadishman on the wall instead of the sheep paintings that made him famous. About 20 works fill the Hagit Gallery space. The show runs through November 2027.
A Museum, a Career, and the Quiet Machinery of Display
Kadishman died in 2015 at the age of 82, but the museum is presenting him as a restless figure who worked for more than 50 years and kept pushing into new aesthetic, disciplinary and philosophical territory. That’s the official museum line, anyway. What the exhibition actually shows is how a major institution packages an artist’s experiments, strips them from the street, and hangs them under gallery lights as a neat retrospective of rebellion that no longer needs to ask permission.
The exhibition focuses on Kadishman’s output between 1969 and 1979, a formative period when he moved away from minimalist sculpting and toward his trademark sheep-based presentations. One work in the show was created in honor of the Israel Museum's 10th anniversary in 1975. The museum is also displaying a behind-the-scenes glimpse of the setup in Jerusalem, with two monochrome photographs that conjure the ambiance of the day and the artist's mien. The whole thing has the tidy feel of institutional memory: the museum remembers, curates, and frames, while the messier life of the work gets pressed into a display case.
Yellow Boards, No Permit
One of the sharper details in the article comes from a 1970s New York project in which Kadishman placed large, rectangular, yellow metal boards on the trunks of trees in Central Park. Mika Nachtailer said, "He didn’t ask for a permit to do that. He just put them up. They were removed a day later," and the article says he pulled a similar antic in Uruguay. That’s the kind of direct action museums love to admire after the fact. The state’s permission system gets bypassed, the work appears, and then the authorities clean it up.
Kadishman had a gentle demeanor but, according to the article, an iron will to follow his ideas through to their artistic denouement. He made an exception to his usual clothing at the Israel Prize ceremony at the President’s Residence in 1995, when he wore long pants. Even that detail lands like a small institutional footnote, the kind of thing that gets preserved because it fits the archive’s appetite for personality.
The exhibition also includes a tree in the museum compound that received the yellow treatment and a spot on the ground in the neighboring Valley of the Cross. Yellow, Nachtailer said, went back to Kadishman’s time on Kibbutz Ma’ayan Baruch, where he lived for three years and worked as a shepherd. Nachtailer said, "For him, yellow was the color of the tractor plowing the field." Kadishman said, "I wanted to work with the Creator’s forest, the organic forest, and incorporate into it a man-made mechanical forest, which would have forms that clash with nature." He also said, "The shadows of the branches and tree trunks were reflected on the yellow panels, changing with the movement of the sun," and, "In nature there are thousands of forms that change with the movement of the sun. My shade of yellow doesn’t exist in the forest’s color palette."
From Directory Pages to City Life
The article says Kadishman embraced everyday objects after a jet-lagged night in New York at 4 a.m., when he ripped a page from a telephone directory and began drawing the structural contours of the Manhattan skyline. In the pre-Internet world, city directories listed names, addresses and telephone numbers, and Kadishman took the directory's textural topography and spun out lines that followed the shapes of the buildings around him. In the following years, similar pages formed the substratum of hundreds of works.
He later said, "I related to each column as if it were a building, a skyscraper." He also said, "Later, I related to the page itself, not what I saw around it, only to what was on the page. I arrived at a whole landscape, paths between the letters, a cardiogram of the page." The article says he took the dry information in the directories into corporeal domains, reimagining the data as a direct and accurate reflection of the street-level reality of millions of New Yorkers, Londoners or other city dwellers, their houses and day-to-day lives.
That’s the strange tension at the center of the show. A directory becomes a city. A page becomes a landscape. A museum becomes the place where all of it gets stabilized, labeled and made safe for public consumption.
The piece says Kadishman enlisted numerous professional colleagues from Israel and abroad, including graphic-leaning artist and educator Raffi Lavie, modernist painting pioneer Yehezkel Streichman, abstract painter Lea Nikel and lyrical abstraction proponent Moshe Kupferman. Their work was originally exhibited at the museum in 1979 under the "Kadishman Connection" banner, and some of those results are included in "Urban Nature." The article says Kadishman fused different disciplines and life energies, and that the delicate balancing act between contemporary civilization and the environment appears repeatedly in the placement of his creations.
The exhibition also includes Kadishman’s eponymous work with naive-looking blue metal tree shapes in forested parts of the museum site. Other artists who interacted with nature included Joshua Neustein, Georgette Battle, Dani Karavan and Itzhak Danziger, who, like Kadishman, studied at the Slade School of Fine Art in London. Kadishman also created Laundry Forest in 1975 near the then-entrance plaza of the Israel Museum, with large white canvas sheets suspended from cables and tree shapes cut out of them. The absence of the natural figure drew observers into completing the picture themselves, and visitors could walk through the work as the material flapped in the wind and reflected sun and shadow.
Laundry Forest had a nostalgic element because Kadishman linked it to childhood memories of playing between freshly laundered sheets his mother hung on a line outside the family home in Tel Aviv. The exhibition’s two monochrome photographs try to catch that atmosphere. The museum, as ever, gets the last word by hanging the evidence on its own walls.