Gordon Gallery's Sculpture Garden

Gordon Gallery's Sculpture Garden, unlike a municipal project or public monuments for

commemorative purposes, strives to be a real sculpture garden, in the classical sense. It

seeks to inspire a pleasant experience, installing sculptures created by the gallery's topmost

sculptors among the trees and low-lying vegetation, next to modest iron benches. It is

an opportunity to see sculpture that is not a part of architecture or the urban space, nor

immersed in gallery and museum installations; an opportunity to sit, breathe, and observe

quietly. Yaacov Dorchin's iron giants tower here, Philip Rantzer's giraffe walks, and Ofer

Lellouche's ghosts hover.

Among other sculptures, the garden features Dorchin's Exit to the Sea: a bold combination

of the muscular machoism of a gigantic steel phallus, almost an Indian totem, and physical

vulnerability—a work in which Dorchin succeeds in extracting soft, refined poetics from the

rusty iron. The sculpture conveys a strong sense of "inside and outside"; of a rigid ego shell

rather than an amorphous unconscious; of hardened armor-like skin, whose innards reveal a

biomorphic array; of chains that call to mind internal organs. Dorchin is like Rumpelstiltskin,

spinning straw into gold. He works with rusting industrial leftover agricultural equipment and

similar torn, abandoned, lost metal scraps. He offers them redemption and magic, and to us

he offers a window into the inner mechanism of the beautiful: for, is it not an axiom that the

beautiful is redemption from the kingdom of purpose? That beauty is the peacock feathers

saying to the peahen: "Look, I'm excessive, I cannot escape a tiger, I have overburdened myself

for you!" In this way, Dorchin can turn his rusting heavy iron scraps into angels—one of the

most dominant images in Western culture: from the winged angels of the Renaissance through

Walter Benjamin's Angel of History in Paul Klee's painting Angelus Novus to the AIDS-era angels

in Tony Kushner's famous play, Angels in America: they represent a link between man and

redemption. In Dorchin's work it is the redemption of iron in art.

On a white iron pedestal under a tree, next to Dorchin's sculptures, rests Sigalit Landau's

bronze Ram—an intersection of different paths from distant sources and origins. This is the

stone sculpture path that begins with prehistoric man, goes through the classical culture

of the Renaissance and the Baroque, continuing all the way to Constantin Brâncuși. It is

the path of deer head images and similar ritual animals in Israeli art, from Danziger and the

Canaanites to Eli Gur Arie. And it is also the path taken by women artists (Frida Kahlo,

Georgia O'Keeffe, to name two distinct examples) who spoke of the power and beauty of

sexuality. Landau's sculpture is smooth and delicate, and has erotic allusions. The stone is

the body, and the body is the ram.

Looking from above is Tsibi Geva's Lattice. Like the terrazzo (balata) and keffiyeh, the

lattice is also an abstract matrix of Israeli DNA, an aesthetic coding of political, economic,

and social truths. Uri Lifshitz's chair stands in the corner, like some Ovidian or Kafkaesque

metamorphosis, an allegory for man's objectification, an intermediate phase between man

and chair, with limbs, ribs, a hand stretched out for charity like a beggar, conveying a circuslike,

crushed, defiant atmosphere. Any sculptor can sculpt a form, but you have to be Lifshitz

to sculpt a non-form, an intermediary stage, a process.

The garden also contains sculptures by Sasha Serber: a silver ring man next to a forged

tree branch in a mischievous site-specific work. The encounter orchestrated by Serber

between high-tech and low-tech, between the future and the past, between an organic

body and industrial materials, is congruent with the garden and its location.

At the entrance to the garden and in its depths, there are figures by Ofer Lellouche:

groups, individuals, a woman, heads. Some are painted in a shade of purple, reminiscent of

the dark glow sometimes seen in a puddle of oil on the side of the road: glistening and dull at

the same time, heavy and viscous, but adorned with a crust of colorful light.

Installed next to Lellouche's beautiful figure, right at the entrance, is a small bronze by

Jan Rauchwerger: a female figure, which preserves the quality of clay work in the bronze

casting. It was clearly created from observation of a living, breathing, constantly changing

body. More than trying to capture the body, the artist attempts to capture the anima, the

inner movement, the one always imprisoned in the living body, even when it is static.

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