Articles

Moshe Shek – sculptor, potter, and unusual investigative artist in the Israeli sculpture scene. Moshe was born in Poland in 1936, in the city of Zamość, where a large community of Jews that had been expelled from Spain had resettled. The heart of this community with its ancient roots was the magnificent bedecked synagogue that they built which served as a warm meeting place for those who came there to pray daily and also for holidays and festivals – when

Moses Shek sees the strata of Jewish history through the prism of the present. Once upon a time, everyone here were Jews. His connection to the Judean Lowlands is strong and deep. Shek, a veteran sculptor and man of substance and spirit, seeks and finds universal cultural connections and roots in the many tunnels and caves in the area. Shek was among the founders of the kibbutz, and only ten years later his statues were already seen on the kibbutz.

Nothing is revealed in its true form but only in opposites – it is precisely through opposites that the true reality of the opposite concept is revealed. It is impossible to achieve this [understanding] with absolute clarity if it does not have a counterpart. It is similar to a man whose art is making tools and vessels from clay and whose work is making pottery tools. The order of his work is to make rounds balls of clay before he

One of the ways that humankind has tried to come into contact with the unknown, from prehistoric times to the present, is through rituals. The ritual experience embraces human belief, emotion and body alike. One cannot exhaust the subject of this exceptionally complex ancient approach in the frame of a short article, however, we can trace one common denominator to its many expressions over the generations. This is the concept that sees everthing that surrounds us as a vital living

The entirety of Moshe Shek’s works – a difficult exhibition to decipher, reveals a handbreadth and covers a handbreadth. It is not an exhibition of the visible but an exhibition of the invisible – an exhibition of longing. Although it’s very busy with the material aspect, it is designed for the immaterial. Precisely because it is built from one of the heaviest materials – the burnt earth – it tries to encompass problems of the spirit. It tries to define

Moshe Shek, known by his friends as Juki, is a unique, long-standing artist who attempts, in his own picturesque and colorful language, to tell the story of the sources of influence, events, times and places that have shaped his life and his artistic outlook. Like other non-native Israeli artists, Moshe Shek knew a different landscape in his childhood. The command, “Go forth from your native land and from your father’s house,” has been a source of personal, physical and spiritual

Niches hewn into the walls of a cave in a neatly arranged rhythm, mud granaries, a wrought iron plow, clay tools with pressed-down round handles at their tips, red-lined grids painted on the sides of the vessels, a keystone with rope marks at the mouth of a cistern, stone terraces next to prickly pear bushes, ziomorphic tools and sculptures – these are some of the artist, Moshe Shek’s, objects that symbolize a longing. The question of the essence of cultural