Spirit of Freedom | David Gerstein

The figure's movement embodies the spirit of freedom and curiosity that drives humanity to seek new discoveries and break boundaries.

Spirit of Freedom | David Gerstein

About the Work and the Creator / Sharon Ofer

 

Spirit of Freedom (2009) is made of green-painted steel in the shape of a schematic human figure. The figure's arms are raised sideways, its rear leg is pulled up, and its front leg is bent as if in a forward movement. The figure is composed of three identical flat shapes placed parallel to each other. When looking from the side, they converge into a single figure with clear spatial outlines, while from every other angle, the three flat "sub-figures" are revealed, simulating the illusory effect of movement achieved by consecutive photographic frames. Within each figure's outline, flat green steel strips twist and turn in a spontaneous painterly style. Butterfly-shaped aluminum plates are fixed on those strips, painted with intensely colored oil paint, in an expressive texture of rough paintbrush strokes.

 

The relationship between the static and dynamic is also articulated in the dialogue between the sculpture's various aspects: between two and three dimensions; between the monochromatic uniformity of the outlines and green twists on the one hand and the butterflies' abstract and profuse coloration; between the steel's immobile weight and the image of running movement. This discourse of contradictions infuses figurativeness into abstraction and vice versa. The viewers' gaze as they move around the sculpture integrates all its component parts into a single, three-dimensional work of art.

 

The statue is located on the lawn in the Jacob and Shoshana Schreiber Square in front of the Elias Sourasky Central Library, and dialogues both with the natural colors around it and with the architecture of the building behind it. The figure's movement from the building to the lawn seems to embody the human spirit of freedom, innocence, and curiosity that propels humanity to a constant search for new discoveries and inspires it to break through the boundaries of the conventional.

 

 

Style, Influences, and Evolution

David Gerstein was born in Jerusalem in 1944 and studied art at the local Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, and subsequently in Paris, New York, and London. He has developed his own style, straddling the boundary between painting and sculpture, and his artwork seeks to bridge the world of art and the public urban environment. His outdoor sculptures decorate public spaces throughout Israel - one example is Big Head (1995) at the Yoav Dagon Sculpture Garden, Ramat HaSharon, and worldwide, including Momentum (2008) in Singapore's central business district and 8 Cyclists (2010) in Seoul. His figurative and colorful pieces are accessible and communicable, and their presence conveys to passersby human insights into daily life and shared emotions. His monumental metal sculptures are created using laser cuts, and the aluminum plates are hand-painted with oil in colors.

 

Gerstein's works evince a desire to follow the aesthetic traditions of artists such as Henri Matisse, who created schematic images using papercuts and whose works were a study of colorfulness, and of Pablo Picasso, who was preoccupied with the fragmentation of shapes. We can also not ignore the obvious impact of Pop Art on Gerstein's style, evident in his choice of industrial materials, their processing into flat pieces, and their seriality. Gerstein combines theme and technique to accomplish a subtle correspondence between the sculpture's formal and material aspects and its narrative aspects. His pieces are calculated down to the last detail and include no chance or unspecified elements.

 

The artist's unique style has formed after many years of search and development before finding his own idiom. Early on, he painted in a realist style and sculpted in wood, before moving to laser-cut metals. In his work, he excels in cutting out real-life scenes, in both the technical sense of cutting the material and in the creative spiritual sense. Gerstein welcomes every interpretation of his work, so long as the sculpture provokes the viewer to think. Rivka Raz writes: "Whoever chooses to view the piece as decorative work is welcome to do so, but if you look at the figures that make it up, you will see that they are not pretty, in fact, they are even ugly, whereas the composite image is beautiful and tantalizing".

 

Artist:
David Gerstein
Name:
Spirit of Freedom, 2009
Location:
Jacob and Shoshana Schreiber Square in front of the Elias Sourasky Central Library
Donated by Jenny and Moshe Gerstenhaber, Switzerland

 

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