Zadok Ben-David

Born in 1949 in Bayhan, Yemen, Zadok Ben-David is an innovative and expressive sculptor. Having grown up in Israel and studying at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design he began to cultivate an interest in metallurgy and fabrication. In 1975 Ben-David moved to England and began studying first at the University of Reading and then at Central St Martins. Arriving in Britain he was confronted with a new artistic landscape. The British abstraction and conceptualism movements of the 1970s opened his eyes to the possibility of using sculpture as a method of exploring humanity’s evolution and relationship with nature.

Exotic Tree is part of the Innerscapes series which Ben-David has been creating over the last 6 years. The Innerscape series plays upon the idea of worlds existing within a larger subject matter. In this piece one can see the arboreal world in which the Lilliputian figures inhabit. Whether the viewer construes them to be part of the tree and therefore existing symbiotically with it or whether the figures have created a separate world within the canopy it forces the viewer to address the issue of man and nature.

Ben-David’s career has grown dramatically since the early 1980s. By 1988 he had been selected to represent Israel at the Venice Biennale and has since won the Grande Biennial Premio at the XIV Biennale. Other solo exhibitions of his work have taken place in the Guangdong Art Museum in China 2007; as well as in 2010 at the Tel Aviv Museum in Israel, where he also won the Tel Aviv Museum of Art sculpture prize. In 2013 Ben-David held two solo exhibitions in Los Angeles and Sydney, both entitled The Other Side of Midnight, he is now working towards a retrospective in Tel Aviv next year.