BIOGRAPHY

Orion, Ezra, Sculptor. b. 1934, Kibbutz Bet Alfa, Israel. Grew up on Kibbutz Ramat Jochanan. Studies: 1952 Bezalel, Jerusalem; 1964-67 St. Martin’s School of Art, London. Teaching: Sde Boker College. Prizes: 1964 America-Israel Cultural Foundation; 1986 Bank Discount Prize for a Young Israeli Artist, Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Works in Public Places: 1980 .The sculpture “Staircase”, Jerusalem; sculpture c. 4,000 metres opposite the peak of Annapurna in the Himalayas. In the mid eighties he developed the conception of the “Sculptural System of the Sun”.

  More about Ezra  

http://www.boker.org.il/meida/negev/orion/about/e-bio.htm

   ARTIST'S   STATEMENT  

 http://www.boker.org.il/meida/negev/orion/about/e-state.htm

Works of Sculpture are launching pads of consciousness - -
Across the Negev mountains and the Sinai Desert, the stone remains of a semi-nomadic culture, dating back to the Bronze age, are scattered. Among other structures formed by these desert nomads were long lines of stone. Still prominent is a lime stone line, nearly 3 miles long, stretching from Mount Ramon to Mount Romem, the highest mountains in the Negev desert. These people also built thousands of stone burial mounds for their chieftains or patriarchs along the desert highgrounds and skylines -
My environmental works - on the Zin Plateau, on the peak of Mt. Ardon above the Ramon crater in the Negev, others opposite Arif - a - Naka in the northern Sinai desert and opposite the peak of Annapurna in the central Himalaya have an affinity with these ancient archeological structures - -
Rocks embody a silence that dates back to the creation of the Solar System: Masses of granite, layers of limestones, dolomite, chalky, flinty layers, horizontal, tilted and vertical, containing 50 million to 1 billion years of existence - -
Sculpture is shaping masses by forces in space and time - extending beyond the human realm. "Plate tectonics" is sculpture - the drift of the continents, the colliding and uplifting of the mountainous ridges, the folding of the earth's crust - Man shaping micromasses by his minute ability, joins for a split second, these cosmic processes - - Scaling oneself against rockiness is an existential experience - time - space - geo-slowness - the silence of light years - -
A rock is a universe, a slowdown, an accretion of ephemeral particles. The particles can be 20 billion years old,. as old as the universe. Astronomy today identifies a cosmos stretching across 20 billion light years, uncountable galaxies, billions of "Solar Systems" and spiralic storms of luminious gas. About 1/1 00% of the total mass of the cosmos is rocky deserts. In one arm of "our galaxy", of some hundred billion suns, we cruise, encircling the galactic center once in 250 million years - We passed "here" last time, in the Permian, and before then in the Cambrium - - The next time is a quarter billion years ahead - -
Homo-erectus conceives the downward direction of his legs as fatigue, exhaustion, the dust from which he originates and to which he returns - the direction of surrender, of gravity, the erosive end of all uplifts of entropy - - upward direction of his head is conceived as spirituality, the Olympus, the Revolt - This psycho-physical orientation lies at the origin of the archaic drive for the vertical take - off - Soaring vertically, antigravitationally, rebelliously, anti- enthropic, severs the Gordian knot of hopelessness. This is an absurd inspiring drive - the archaic-mythical and the rational combined within oneself - - -

t o w a r d s   t h e   e t e r n a l   i n f i n i t y   o f   u n i v e r s e s - - -

o f     c l u s t e r s     o f     u n i v e r s e s  -   -    -       -        -          -

Source: http://www.boker.org.il/meida/negev/orion/about/e-state.htm
 

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