David Gerstein

Monument for the 20th Century

2007

Trained on several continents (Bezalel Academy in Jerusalem, in Paris at the Ecole Supérieure des Beaux-arts, the Art Student League in New York, and the St Martin's School of Art in London), David Gerstein has developed, over the course of his 50 years of career, a hybrid practice and aesthetic. At the crossroads of pop art, minimalism and optical art, his art reflects this plural and cosmopolitan dimension: a vibrant creation. His approach is characterized by shaped-cutting and figures; a process that he reconnects with his childhood and adolescence when he helped his father in his leather cutting workshop. Colour, which has become more and more vivid, more and more pop, giving movement to the works, is just as central. (Gerstein is an "artist-craftsman".) He cuts steel and aluminum, which he then paints in order to inscribe his characters and scenes in three-dimensional structures and wall creations that have both an immutable and vibrant feature. The “paintings” and compositions he recreates come from the world of childhood, scenes from everyday life, family, sport, the musical world, urban life or even animals and plants. He uses familiar figures and everyday objects, but also more abstract forms, without hierarchy; representations to which everyone can relate and from which new stories can be told. Having designed numerous projects and received public commissions around the world (France, United States, Israel, Singapore), his work acquires a whole new dimension when it is confronted with external environments, with open spaces; thus falling within the so-called monumental work. Among his public projects and works in public spaces, can be mentioned his sculptures for the Hsinchu Stadium in Taïwan (2002); his exhibitions at Hebrew University of Jerusalem (in 1985, 1999 and 2003); his project Presence-Present for the Jerusalem Biennale for Contemporary Jewish Art (2015); or more recently (2017), his sculptures for the National Park of the Guizhou province, in China. His work has also been exhibited at Ramat-Gan Museum of Israeli Art, the Performing Arts Center in Tel-Aviv, at the Ashod Museum of Art, MoBY (Museums of Bat Yam), Haifa Museum of Contemporary Art … "I particularly enjoy working on the outdoor sculptures because they confront me with technical problems of different kinds. I have to consider the place, the environment, the way of life of the people. It is a real challenge for me and a logical and essential evolution of my work".