Zadok Ben-David, wizard and magician – the creator of an enchanting scultural world

Zadok Ben-David is one of the most famous contemporary sculptors. He created his own original and distinguishable style, which has become the embodiment of the idea of modern sculpture. The whole world of unusual shapes generated by Ben-David’s rich imagination. This world excites and impresses the viewer like quirks in the circus – no wonder his solo exhibitions bring together record numbers of visitors (in 2010 Zadok’s installation Human Nature in Tel-Aviv Museum collected an unprecedented quantity of viewers – about 6 000 per day).This autumn Ukrainians get an opportunity to visit Zadok’s “magical tabernacle – he is the special guest of the Sixth Grand Sculptural Salon at Mystetskyi Arsenal. And we have had a chance to make sure that the wizard has a jovial personality, and to ask him about the unusual sphere of sculpture.      

 

Zadok Ben-David


Hanna Tsyba The main objects of your works are people, birds, plants, trees – something very natural, realistic and live. Does being closer to nature constitute your key message?

Zadok Ben-David I would say that my work is about human. Twenty years before – if you see in the images – I was using animals, and the animals are metaphorical to human attitude too. The circle of life and death, human relations, the inner human nature – this is the thematic basis of my work. Plants and animals are just the metaphors.

Autumn Reflection, which is one of your signature works, is a tree with tiny human figures instead of leaves in its crown. It seems that the work speaks of the connection between human and nature. Is it so?   

— You know, nature is to me the feeling and emotion, and everything that is man-made is rational. Since I came to England from Israel to study, one of the thing that has been surprising me most of all is to see in the street in London a big pot cast in concrete and the tree planted there.  I do not understand – why not plant a tree in the ground. This feature is to me a clash between cultures, types of logic, rationalism and emotions. Autumn Reflection is the metaphor not only for relationships between human nature, but also between two cultures, the metaphor of the conflict between civilization and nature inside a person.

This is not the only work in which I’m using an image of a tree consisting of people. A few years ago I was approached by a Holocaust museum in Jerusalem, which invited me to participate in the contest  by creating a memorial to partisans who died during World War II – and I created a similar sculpture. I thought about the fact that forest used to be the home for partisans, and realized that the whole thing can be symbolized by one single tree. The project won the contest. Now there is a 6.5 meter sculpture located in Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. It looks like a regular tree from the distance, but approaching it one can see that it consists of human figures.

 

This work is more dramatic than Autumn Reflection. It is indeed a really good symbol for the guerrilla movement, which was topical for post-war Ukrainian context too.   

— Thank you! Though I should say that after I had created a tree consisting of people, I decided to make a human consisting of trees. This is how sculptures with a tree inside a human body appeared, for example Аll Open, 2007.

 

This again refers to the nature and human, resembling a visual metaphor for Rousseaus ideas about the natural man. What does this work stand for?

— This is a tree similar to the blood system. The viewer cannot definitely tell whether it is a tree or blood vessels. I’m playing with this similarity, as it is the tree and the vessels at the same time. This work, as well as everything else I make, it not about the natural human, but more about the human nature.  

 

Tell us about your works presented at the Grand Sculptural Salon.

— I have presented three big installations —Blackfield, 2008–2012, Evolution and Theory, 1999, and Blackflowers, 2010–2012. Blackfield originally consists of 20 000 metal flowers on one side - black, and the other - colored. Eventually I realized that this installation can be split and exhibited in various locations around the world, because even a few thousand of flowers provide an exhaustive picture. The Grand Sculpture exhibition has 17 000 – and believe me, this is a lot (the rest are on exhibition in San Francisco). Evolution and Theory is a work older by 10 years. Its idea is based on Darwin’s theory of evolution. It consists of 250 sculptures. The highest sculpture is three feet tall, and the smallest one is about 30 cm. But the main point is that all these sculptures are made after illustrations from scientific works of the XIX century. Today the object of science cannot be seen with the naked eye – everything has been reduced to the size of microchips, and we cannot even imagine the way it looks and works. Actually, Evolution and Theory is about the evolution of science. Thematically, these two installations are connected. I exhibited them together only once before – it was the Korean Biennale, the topic of which was "Evolution". The idea of scientific evolution is also traced within Blackfield. Moreover, samples of all flowers have been also taken from the illustrations in old botanic encyclopaedias, which in turn somebody's deft hands sketched meticulously from real flowers.

 

 How many types of plants are presented within the Blackfield installation?  

— 900 species, and they are all repeated. You are going to laugh, but I know the names of no more than 50 types of flowers - such as roses, sunflowers! (laughs) I am not a botanist – in this I’m an ordinary ignoramus. I do not know the difference between all these nine hundred species except for the shape. It is not important to me. To me flowers are the symbol. We bring flowers in the happiest and the saddest moments of our lives. It is a metaphor that I use in my work. Two sides of the flower in the Blackfield symbolize life and death, joy and sorrow – black flowers that were burned, and colourful flowers that abound with life. For many people, Blackfield is associated with a personal problem or the worldwide tight. But on the other hand the installation raises a completely different world in front of the audience – colourful, inspiring for hope and optimism. I've seen people who could not hold back tears when looking at this work, so emotional it is.

 

Blackfield is a wonderful Illusion. Under any angle these flowers on a white sandy background look different: as a picture on a white page of an encyclopaedia, as the field of real, three-dimensional flowers, as an army of toy soldiers, as paper patterns ... But they are flat and made ​​of metal. What techniques and materials do you use to create your work?

— I think that I always choose the best material for my ideas. Before I started to work with metal, I experimented a lot, because my goal was to create a shape with the three-dimensional effect. When I just started, we worked with traditional materials – bronze, glass, clay, plaster, even stone. However, material is a tool. The important thing is what can be made of it. Therefore it is important that the material matches the artistic strategy. As for the technique, the flowers of the Blackfield were created in a way similar to etching: first an image is applied to a thin sheet of stainless steel, and then this piece of metal is placed in acid solution for a certain chemical process to take place. Later all the flowers were painted by hand. First I painted flowers myself – I coloured a few hundred of them. However, when my ambitions grew slightly and I wanted to increase the work, I invited my friends, artists, to help me. We were all working continuously to create more and more flowers. When I started to exhibit this work, there were only 1500 flowers. Gradually, the number grew to 20 000. But when the flowers were being coloured, artists, carried by their imagination, were able to paint anything. Therefore the colours of the plants do not meet nature. The same species is represented in different colour variations. All the colours come completely from fantasy. 

 

 

Hanna Tsyba



10.12.2018