Zadok Ben-David was born in Bayhan, Yemen, in 1949, and was brought up in Israel. He studied at Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem (1971-73), Reading University (1975) and St Martin's School of Art, London (1976). When he moved to London to study he not only had to come to terms with a new verbal language, but also…
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Zadok Ben-David was born in Bayhan, Yemen, in 1949, and was brought up in Israel. He studied at Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem (1971-73), Reading University (1975) and St Martin's School of Art, London (1976). When he moved to London to study he not only had to come to terms with a new verbal language, but also a new visual language - British abstraction and conceptual art of the 1970s was very different from that in Jerusalem. At that time, leading British sculptors such as Anthony Caro, Phillip King and Tim Scott were teaching at St Martin's. After two intensive years of study, Ben-David found himself alone in a Greenwich studio and felt the need to come to terms with his own identity through his work - a search for meaning rather than working intuitively. He acknowledged everything that he found in his adopted culture, but selected carefully those aspects that would bring greater meaning to his work as an artist.
Colour and animal forms are characteristic of Zadok Ben-David's early work. The remembered warmth of the Yemeni desert comes through in warm yellows and reds, and the animals, recalled largely through childhood stories, play out their mythical tales. Textured surfaces absorb the light and help the colours to resonate, and the contrast of matt black shadows enable the forms to flatten. Metaphysics has drawn Ben-David to an interest in the alchemist and man's scientific discoveries in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Scientific book illustrations from this time also hold a great fascination for him, and have found their way into his installation work. All of these focus on an underlying interest in man, his humanity and his progression in the world.
