Sheep Grazing in a Field

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’s head. In every other Kadishman work here Rami Alon does what Kadishman did: a frontal face filling the panel, with no surroundings. Here there is a flock and a field — which means distance, ground, and figures that shrink as they recede.

It is also the largest and longest in the group: 69 by 115 cm, and nearly five times as long to make as a single sheep.