David Gerstein (artist) - Sculpture

Sculpture

Gerstein's aim to portray the daily experience of Israeli life ironically came to fruition in the 1980s. Gerstein figuratively describes chapters from the Israeli experience, derived, among others, from childhood memories in Tel Aviv. The first series depicts Tel Aviv with its Bauhaus-style balconies, with a humoristic irony. This series was based on Gerstein's memories of his parents' generation of "little Tel Aviv"; people whom he regarded with wonder and humor. These paintings express the tension between the sabra generation of the children and the relatively "exilic" generation of the parents. The series contain elderly people, the "old world" reflected in their faces, as seen from the eyes of a sabra child looking at the "generation of the desert"; the generation that founded the country, having had immigrated at a young age, yet still marked by the heritage of the "exile". The origins of this series can be found in Gerstein's watercolors and gouache on paper from the '70s, parts of which were adapted to canvas oil paintings. In the '80s, Gerstein developed this into another series of paintings, those of bathers in the Dead Sea, about which Avraham Eilat wrote,"the residents of the balconies have gone down to the Dead Sea where they lie about on the shore, covered in mud, exposing their pinkish bodies to the mercy of the sun's rays and the salt and get slowly fried".

Despite the positive response his paintings evoked, both from the critics and the art world, Gerstein felt the need to renew, find new directions and expand his artistic boundaries. During 1980–1987, while continuing to paint, Gerstein experimented with wood sculptures, which were "three-dimensional while preserving a two-dimensional quality". Gerstein sought to "expand the borders of painting" to the domain of the third-dimension. Dissatisfied with his few sculpting experiments, the artist discovered that he could cut and assemble the elements into a type of sculpture in space. The idea came to him during reserve duty while dismantling cardboard boxes containing cartridges. He painted on the inner partition of a box and then reassembled it. From this evolved the idea of painting on large-scale cardboard constructed into sculpture. Following a number of sculptures from cardboard, Gerstein used wood and thin aluminum. Gerstein defines those years as a "struggle" between painting and sculpture, comparing his relationship to painting as that to a wife, as opposed to his relationship to sculpture: a captivating, but forbidden, affair.

Gerstein first exhibited these sculptures at the Horace Richter Gallery in 1981. This was a bold step for the thirty-six-year-old painter who had not been known for, or exhibited, sculpture previously. The works were of aluminum and wood, and the subject matter was a continuation of that of the '70s: his mother riding a bicycle, cats, flower vases and various still life elements. In the following years, Gerstein exhibited at two main galleries of the time, Sara Gilat and Ruth Debel, with work reflecting the artist's continued "search" for a new language integrating painting and three-dimensionality. In 1984 Gerstein traveled to New York, the first time since the conclusion of his studies there, and began working with the art dealer Marilyn Goldberg, who ordered the production of six limited edition aluminum prints titled "Art Cats". The series included cutouts of cats inspired by those of twelve known artists, from van Gogh to Picasso and Lichtenstein. In the wake of these works, Gerstein was invited to exhibit at the Youth Wing of the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. The exhibit in 1987 was presented under the heading, "From Dudu to 3-D", comprising sculptures that were "colorful, cheerful, amusing and reminiscent of toys or paper cutouts". The exhibit was a summary of Gerstein's three-dimensional work of the previous seven years and was a breakthrough for the artist. Most of the exhibited work was purchased by museums abroad and Gerstein was subsequently invited to exhibit in the United States and Canada.