The artist Menashe Kadishman

Kadishman was born in Tel Aviv to Bilha and Ben-Zion, who was a pioneer. When he was 15, his

father died. Kadishman completed his high school studies at the Max Payne Professional School in Tel Aviv.

Kadishman going to the IDF, there he joined the first Nahal unit, which was established at the time, Kadishman was stationed at Kibbutz Maayan Baruch in the Galilee.

At Kibbutz Maayan, Kadishman was a shepherd, which greatly influenced his works. The sheep are mostly drawn around the Israeli border, barbed wire, and what is most important to him is the fact that the sheep,

in fact, are limited by an international border.

In the years 1947-1950 he studied sculpture with Moshe Sternschuss, later with Rudy Lehmann in the years 1959-1960. In the 1960s he lived and worked in London and even began to succeed there.

In 1968, he represented Israel in Documenta in Kassel, Germany, and in 1978 he exhibited 18 sheep on the back of the canteen in Venice’s Venice Biennale with a blue color under the name “The Sheep Project: Nature as Art and Art as Nature”.
This exhibit was reconstructed at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art in an exhibition of his works that opened in December 2005 and was called “Draw Me a Sheep”, Which made him very famous. He was also famous for his colorful sheep portraits, which he began painting in 1995, Since then he created thousands of portraits of this series.

In his sculptures Kadishman used iron and other materials to create epic environmental art. At the beginning, in the 1960s, he sculpted in abstract style using geometrical shapes, and later sculpted less abstract sculptures, including “Binding of Isaac,” a street sculpture made of stainless steel found in Tel Aviv opposite the Tel Aviv Museum and the court building.

His street sculpture “Ascension” is made of steel and is 15 meters high. The sculpture is located near the Habimah Theater in Tel Aviv and is a prominent symbol of its surroundings.

In 1995 he was chosen as the Israel Prize laureate in the field of sculpture, and in 2005 the film “The Blue Sheep” (directed by Danny Dotan and Dalia Mevorach) was screened at the Jerusalem Film Festival.

In 1976-1977, he played in films directed by Ze’ev Revach “Only Today” and “The Thief of the Thief of Exemption” in the role of the Maharishi.

Menashe Kadishman died on May 8, 2015, at the age of 82, and was buried in the Kiryat Shaul cemetery.