A Moveable Feast
Written By: Meir Ronnen
The current exhibition of kinetic sculptures by Zahara Schatz is a remarkable example of filial continuity — and contrast. Her father was Prof. Boris Schatz, founder of the Bezalel School and M useum; he is the hero of the mammoth year-long exhibition devoted to the “Old Bezalel” and its teachers, now at the Israel Museum. Zahara and her late brother Bezalel (Lilik) Schatz were both brought up in the Bezalel’s classrooms; in the early Fifties both returned here from a sojourn in the U.S., where their father had died two decades earlier. Then Zahara returned to the U.S. to marry; and worked there for over 15 years. Widowed, she returned here in 1976. This is her first show since.
Father Boris Schatz was a fin-d’siecle romantic and, in later life, a Jewish romantic and ideologist. His sculptures were not only realist, but propagandistic. All isms, even impressionism, were banned from his school. His daughter, as young-in-heart as ever, makes sculptures that are the very antithesis of her father’s work: twirling abstract calligraphic linear shapes that carry no message except the celebration of their ever changing forms.
Schatz shapes a single length of aluminium or brass tubing that sits and moves upon a point of balance. These shake, jiggle or glide on the top of vertical plinths of wood or metal, the upper surface of which is gently concave, preventing the sculpture from slipping off and as it twirls upon itself, writing its various compositions in enclosed or unfolding space. A mere touch of a finger or a strong breath of air is sufficient to keep one of these finely balanced sculptures moving for 15 minutes. Some stand head high, others are tiny table-top works, gilded like jewels. Some are balanced by a circular or tubular counterweight affixed to the metal tube at a critical point. This solid object also provides an often satisfying visual counterweight to the calligraphic line, a sort of compositional full-stop or semi-colon.
Outdoors in the garden, Schatz shows mobiles and stabiles, one of the former springing vibrantly from the wall; but these works, with their large obtrusive black counterweights, lack the easy elegance and convincing line of the more austere balance pieces.
Schatz’s sculptures lie somewhere between the work of the late Alexander Calder and that of kinetic sculptor Jose de Rivera, who makes marvellously finished and extremely beautiful stainless steel tubing sculptures that also sit and turn on a fixed point. But the latter’s movement depends on a small electric motor (hidden in the plinth) and they move in one plane only. Schatz has come up with a simpler device that widens the possibilities of movement.
Schatz would be well-advised to stick to her austere pieces where less is definitely more; and to give up using aluminium — an unrewarding metal — in favour of her elegant brass and gilded copper pieces.
Also on view at the gallery, in a folder that can be seen upon request, are a number of impeccably made coloured drawings in a semi-abstract, semi-surrealist manner, done by Schatz nearly two decades ago but attesting to the felicity of hand so evident in her latest sculptures. (Debel Gallery, Ein Karem). Till May 28.
The Jerusalem Post Magazine
A Moveable Feast
Written By: Meir Ronnen
The current exhibition of kinetic sculptures by Zahara Schatz is a remarkable example of filial continuity — and contrast. Her father was Prof. Boris Schatz, founder of the Bezalel School and M useum; he is the hero of the mammoth year-long exhibition devoted to the “Old Bezalel” and its teachers, now at the Israel Museum. Zahara and her late brother Bezalel (Lilik) Schatz were both brought up in the Bezalel’s classrooms; in the early Fifties both returned here from a sojourn in the U.S., where their father had died two decades earlier. Then Zahara returned to the U.S. to marry; and worked there for over 15 years. Widowed, she returned here in 1976. This is her first show since.
Father Boris Schatz was a fin-d’siecle romantic and, in later life, a Jewish romantic and ideologist. His sculptures were not only realist, but propagandistic. All isms, even impressionism, were banned from his school. His daughter, as young-in-heart as ever, makes sculptures that are the very antithesis of her father’s work: twirling abstract calligraphic linear shapes that carry no message except the celebration of their ever changing forms.
Schatz shapes a single length of aluminium or brass tubing that sits and moves upon a point of balance. These shake, jiggle or glide on the top of vertical plinths of wood or metal, the upper surface of which is gently concave, preventing the sculpture from slipping off and as it twirls upon itself, writing its various compositions in enclosed or unfolding space. A mere touch of a finger or a strong breath of air is sufficient to keep one of these finely balanced sculptures moving for 15 minutes. Some stand head high, others are tiny table-top works, gilded like jewels. Some are balanced by a circular or tubular counterweight affixed to the metal tube at a critical point. This solid object also provides an often satisfying visual counterweight to the calligraphic line, a sort of compositional full-stop or semi-colon.
Outdoors in the garden, Schatz shows mobiles and stabiles, one of the former springing vibrantly from the wall; but these works, with their large obtrusive black counterweights, lack the easy elegance and convincing line of the more austere balance pieces.
Schatz’s sculptures lie somewhere between the work of the late Alexander Calder and that of kinetic sculptor Jose de Rivera, who makes marvellously finished and extremely beautiful stainless steel tubing sculptures that also sit and turn on a fixed point. But the latter’s movement depends on a small electric motor (hidden in the plinth) and they move in one plane only. Schatz has come up with a simpler device that widens the possibilities of movement.
Schatz would be well-advised to stick to her austere pieces where less is definitely more; and to give up using aluminium — an unrewarding metal — in favour of her elegant brass and gilded copper pieces.
Also on view at the gallery, in a folder that can be seen upon request, are a number of impeccably made coloured drawings in a semi-abstract, semi-surrealist manner, done by Schatz nearly two decades ago but attesting to the felicity of hand so evident in her latest sculptures. (Debel Gallery, Ein Karem). Till May 28.
The Jerusalem Post Magazine