Zvika Lachman – by Mike Trent

For the past two months Zvika Lachman has been an artist in residence at the Josef & Anni Albers Foundation in Connecticut.

Zvika Lachman

by Mike Trent

 

For the past two months Zvika Lachman has been an artist in residence at the Josef & Anni Albers Foundation in Connecticut. Geoffrey Hartman in his essay "Sculptor as Midwife" (from Lachman’s 1999 catalogue "Ransom of the Father" for and exhibition at The Museum of Israeli Art, Ramat-Gan) describes Lachman’s project.

"Zvi Lachman’s sculptures are far from minimalist ventures, though some retain the influence of Giacometti. A craggy robustness vanishes without warning, becoming thin and fragile as is the case with the left hand of Isaac I, or with Abraham’s arm in the Binding statute, an arm that actually breaks (without breaking) and evokes a snapped umbilical. Though the sculptor’s primal connection with materials in the process of being shaped, and even with his wedge-like tools, remains figurative, it is not conveyed by a Rodin-like, as if miraculous, emergence from metal or rock but by an emergence into them."

During the last two years he has focused on a series of homages to other artists (Masaccio, Velasquez, Rembrandt, Gericault, Goya, Picasso and Cezanne, and Maurycy Gottlieb). This work in progress in pastels and charcoal explores and redefines spatial relations between the artist and the viewer, the historical past and the viewer’s present moment.

Lachman’s recent work from his residency at the Josef & Anni Albers Foundation includes the latest developments from the homage series, his sketched moments from nature, as well as three sculptures. Some of these paintings and drawings are scheduled to be exhibited in December in Israel at the Golkonda Gallery. A preview of this work was sponsored by the Malka Lubelski Culture Foundation and exhibited in New York City last month.