Menashe Kadishman

Kadishman is an Israeli sculptor and painter.
Menashe Kadishman, artist, born 21 August 1932; died 8 May 2015.
From 1947 to 1950 he studied under the Israeli sculptor Moshe Sternschuss at the Avni Institute in Tel Aviv, and in 1954 with Rudi Lehmann in Jerusalem. In 1959 he moved to London where he attended Central Saint Martin`s College of Art and Design and the Slade School of Art. He remained in London until 1972. In 1965 he had his first solo exhibition, at the Grosvenor Gallery, which was followed by many exhibitions and commissions by public institutions worldwide.

Kadishman is most known for his beautiful metal and iron large-scale simplistic urban sculptures. He is inspired by biblical stories such as the Sacrifice of Itzhak, which are creatively transformed to new narratives.
Kadishman sculptures of the 1960s were Minimalist in style and so designed as to appear to defy gravity.
Over the last forty years he has had numerous exhibitions across the world in museums and leading international galleries. He represented Israel at the Venice Biennale in 1978 when he created for the Israeli pavilion a herd of blue metal sheep. In his youth, between 1950 and 1953, Kadishman worked as a shepherd on a Kibbutz. This experience with nature, sheep and shepherding had a significant impact on his later artistic work and career. In 1980, he began to paint sheep portraits each one is different from the other. These instantly-recognizable sheep portraits soon became his artistic "trademark". 

In 1995 Kadishman won Israel’s honor prize, the Israel Prize for Plastic Arts, which was added to a long list of prizes he won previously. His works are in collections of renowned museums across the world.