Dov Feigin (1907-2000), eight studies for sculptures, five of which experiment with the "column with eye" motif, seen in the work "a watching eye" (1962) and its later version, the Military Industry Memorial (1989).
Pierced and carved wood; carved wax on wood; cardboard.
Dov Feigin was born in Luhansk, Russia (today, Ukraine). Being a Zionist activist in Soviet Russia, he was arrested and imprisoned for three years, later immigrating to Palestine and joining Kibbutz Afikim. During the 1930s, he moved with his wife to Tel-Aviv and later travelled to Paris to study at the École des Arts Décoratifs. Feigin was one of the founders of the New Horizons movement and the artists village in Ein Hod and was active in various art institutions. He made many memorials and environmental sculptures, including a wall relief for the Shalom passenger ship, a wall at the Kennedy memorial and other sculptures that are placed in public parks and sites throughout the country.
Art scholar Mordechai Omer, in his foreword to the Dov Feigin retrospective catalogue (Tel Aviv Museum of Art, 2005), writes: "Dov Feigin's oeuvre embraces an important and entire chapter in the history of Israeli sculpture, for it faithfully represents the first endeavors to eliminate the partition between the local and universal, which stemmed from the longing for the abstract […] Dov Feigin was one of the founders of 'New Horizons' […] While for most of the group's members, who were led by the desire to liberate themselves from figuration by means of abstraction, the point of departure of their sculpture was and remained figurative, Feigin – deliberately – began his sculpture from an abstract and ideational point of departure, and his sculptures were based on simple and reductive geometrical forms […] Dov Feigin's late sculptures are graced with spontaneity and freedom; their parallel in the realm of human experiences is, more than anything, music, rhythm that spreads out in the open space and blends with it totally".
Feigin described the Military Industry Memorial in a 1989 interview: "… It's tension, the column, a line in the middle. I always unite two forms, I admit, I have something internal that way. To unify – that, you know, is my personal history. It's not just that I've lived in a period of revolutions, there were all kinds of cruel things, wars all the time. The entire world aspires to unification, and all the time they're separating. Tension, and from the depth – something leaps! […] If I'd gone into details, I wouldn't have felt true to myself. A leaping tension – that too is my truth".
Wax on wood studies (4): 12X24 cm. Wood studies (4): 17X33.5 cm. Good condition. Blemishes. Stains. Pencil numbering on verso of some of the plates.
Literature: Dov Feigin, edited by Irith Hadar. Tel Aviv Museum of Art, 2005. pp. 127-128.
Provenance: The Uzi Agassi Collection.