Zadok Ben-David

Description

In the early 1990s, Zadok Ben-David, who had been making animal sculptures with human attributes, turned his thoughts towards the opposite notion: the idea of the beast within man. But there is, in addition, landscape within the form. The horizontal line drawn along the back to the head of this crouched figure forms a horizon on which cavorting figures describe his inner self. Zadok Ben-David has created something he calls an 'inner-scape'. It is not a self-portrait.

This figure was first made as an outline drawing in metal rods, then fleshed out with wire mesh and covered with a textured coating of resin. The inner figures are drawn and cut in aluminium with a jig saw - 'almost quicker than drawing for me now,' says Ben-David. In this case, the whole was then cast in bronze.

The silhouette form is typical of Zadok Ben-David's sculpture. It came from his use of shadows in earlier work, for example, The Lizard Hunter Who Has Been Followed by His Own Shadow and The Marvellous Adventure of A Yellow Elephant, both of 1985. The shadows were just one element in a work, but have since become the whole sculpture. In their likeness to shadows, these new sculptures are black and have only a hint of three-dimensional form.

Zadok Ben-David used his drawing for a smaller version of this sculpture as a guide for working the metal rod into the outline shape of the piece. It shows not only the outline drawing in charcoal, but also scorch-marks and holes where the hot metal rods were bent to follow the contours of the drawing and where they were welded together. Ben-David gave the drawing to Sculpture at Goodwood when this sculpture was commissioned.