The Israel Museum is showing the "Urban Nature" collection, a focused exhibition of about 20 works by Menashe Kadishman that deliberately sidesteps his famous sheep paintings to explore a formative decade most visitors have never seen. Curated by Amitai Mendelsohn with assistance from Mika Nachtailer, the show occupies the Hagit Gallery space and zeroes in on Kadishman's output between 1969 and 1979, when he moved away from minimalist sculpting and toward the trademark sheep-based presentations that would define his later career. Kadishman died in 2015 at the age of 82 after working for more than 50 years, and the exhibition offers a new perspective on his oeuvre by highlighting a period when he was still searching.
The Telephone Directory Breakthrough
The show captures a colorful figure who kept pushing into new aesthetic, disciplinary and philosophical territory. One breakthrough came after 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, 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 created a piece in honor of the Israel Museum's 10th anniversary in 1975 using this technique. A few years later, Kadishman said, "I related to each column as if it were a building, a skyscraper." He later added, "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.
Collaborative Experiments and the Kadishman Connection
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, 47 years ago, 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. He had a gentle demeanor but an iron will to follow his ideas through to their artistic denouement.
Yellow Metal Boards and Guerrilla Installations
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. The exhibition 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."
Laundry Forest and the Israel Museum Grounds
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. Kadishman 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 is said to close in November 2027.
Why This Matters:
This exhibition arrives at a moment when Israel's cultural institutions continue operating despite regional tensions and security challenges, demonstrating the resilience of the country's artistic infrastructure. The Israel Museum's commitment to revisiting Kadishman's experimental decade underscores how Israeli cultural life persists even as the nation confronts existential threats on multiple fronts. Kadishman's work from 1969 to 1979 captures a period of national consolidation after the 1967 and 1973 wars, when Israeli artists were forging new identities that blended Western modernism with local landscapes and memories. His telephone directory pieces transformed urban data into organic forms, mirroring Israel's own attempt to build modern cities while maintaining connection to ancient land. The show's focus on collaboration with other Israeli artists reflects the tight-knit creative community that has sustained the nation's cultural output for decades. By preserving and exhibiting this work, the museum reinforces Israel's role as a center of artistic innovation in a region where cultural expression is often constrained by political ideology or religious doctrine.