Horse

About this work

Menashe Kadishman (1932–2015) was a shepherd before he was an artist. In 1978 he represented Israel at the Venice Biennale and brought live sheep into the pavilion, painted blue. From then until his death he painted thousands of sheep — almost all frontal, almost all head and eyes only, in thick paint spread fast with a knife.

For him the sheep was never only a sheep. It is the ram of the Binding of Isaac, caught in the thicket and slaughtered in place of the son. Kadishman, who also made "Shalechet" at the Jewish Museum Berlin — ten thousand iron faces with open mouths that visitors walk across — tied the sheep explicitly to Israeli bereavement and the sacrifice of sons.

Kadishman painted in one thick, fast stroke. Mosaic is the exact opposite: no stroke, no speed, and no correcting. Each sheep here is dozens of hours of laying stone after stone to reconstruct a gesture that took minutes. Rami Alon gave the Kadishman group 226 working days across six years.

This is not a sheep but a horse’s head. Kadishman worked with horses as well, but the sheep took over his name. This head keeps the same frontality and the same thick line, but the proportion is entirely different: a horse has long ears and an extended muzzle, and the contour stretches lengthwise instead of spreading sideways.

The same horse head appears again in this exhibition as a table top.