The Israel Museum is showing the "Urban Nature" collection, a long-overdue look at Menashe Kadishman's experimental decade before he became famous for painting sheep. The exhibition, curated by Amitai Mendelsohn with assistance from Mika Nachtailer, includes about 20 works in the Hagit Gallery space and offers a new perspective on an artist who died 11 years ago at the age of 82.
Kadishman worked for more than 50 years and kept pushing into new aesthetic, disciplinary and philosophical territory. But he's mostly remembered for one thing: those sheep. This show focuses on his output between 1969 and 1979, a formative period when he moved away from minimalist sculpting and toward his trademark sheep-based presentations. It's a window into the restless creativity that came before the brand.
From Phone Books to Skylines
The breakthrough came during a jet-lagged night in New York at 4 a.m., when Kadishman 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. 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.
The exhibition includes a work he created in honor of the Israel Museum's 10th anniversary in 1975, 51 years ago. A few years later, Kadishman said, "I related to each column as if it were a building, a skyscraper." He later 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." 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.
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, 47 years ago, under the "Kadishman Connection" banner, and some of those results are included in "Urban Nature." Kadishman fused different disciplines and life energies, and the delicate balancing act between contemporary civilization and the environment appears repeatedly in the placement of his creations.
Yellow Interventions and Guerrilla Art
One example is a 1970s New York project in which he 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." He pulled a similar antic in Uruguay. He had a gentle demeanor but 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, 31 years ago, when he wore long pants.
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 went back to his 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."
The Museum as Canvas
Kadishman maintained a long relationship with the Israel Museum and used its hilltop grounds and vegetation as a setting for his creations. His eponymous work with naive-looking blue metal tree shapes sits 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, 51 years ago, 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 offers 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 exhibition closes in November 2027.
Why This Matters:
This exhibition challenges the flattening of an artist's legacy into a single recognizable image. Kadishman's sheep paintings made him famous, but they also obscured a decade of radical experimentation with urban data, guerrilla installations, and the collision between nature and human intervention. His telephone directory works transformed bureaucratic information into visceral maps of city life — a prescient meditation on how data shapes our understanding of place and community. His yellow interventions in public parks anticipated today's debates about art, permission, and who controls public space. By foregrounding this earlier work, the Israel Museum restores complexity to an artist who spent his career refusing to be pinned down. It's a reminder that creative restlessness doesn't always produce marketable results, but it often produces the most interesting ones.