Testing his metal

Six years ago, Nitzan Avidor traded in his job as a mechanical engineer to sculpt statues of biblical figures.

By CARL HOFFMAN
Nitzan Avidor metal sculpture 521 (photo credit: Courtesy)
Nitzan Avidor metal sculpture 521
(photo credit: Courtesy)
Nitzan Yoel Avidor lives on the moshav where he was born and raised. Now 49, divorced and with one son just entering the army, Avidor has spent most of his life in Gan Haim, just north of Kfar Saba, where the city fades away into farms and fields. He lives on a little piece of land that contains his house, the house of his elderly parents, a couple of outbuildings, a tiny fruit orchard and a small garden that he calls his “relaxing place,” where he grows melons and heirloom vegetables.
Until recently, Avidor’s life was nothing out of the ordinary. He grew up, went into the army and served as a tank commander. He did the usual post-army trip around the world. He came home, thought seriously about his future, and studied mechanical engineering.
He then landed a job as maintenance manager at a local industrial plant and settled himself in for a long, quiet life.
And then, about seven years ago, he remembered that he had once cherished a special dream. Avidor summarily quit his job and began to make sculpture – fascinating sculpture – out of metal. He began to make sculpture that was at times amusing and at times disturbing. Even more curiously, the very secular Sabra moshavnik began making statues of biblical personages such as Moses and Jonah, as well as statues that raise their arms to heaven in gestures of supplication and prayer.
Today, a long-neglected shed has been converted into a colorful studio workshop, and the land around it is festooned with a horde of figurative statues, posed in a variety of positions, painted in bright primary colors and telling an array of compelling stories – some from the Bible, others from Greek mythology, and still others from day-to-day life.
So what happened to Nitzan Avidor? “Sometimes I like to look at my life like scenes from a movie,” Avidor explains as we wander around his backyard, “and I’m happy to tell you that one of the nicest scenes from my life is my ex-wife throwing my clothes through the windows of our house and telling me, ‘You can come and collect them!’” After a loud laugh, which brings on a coughing fit from way too many Magna cigarettes, Avidor gets serious and says, “My mother came to me a few years ago and asked me, ‘What happened to you? Where did this art come from? How did this come to you?’ She wasn’t aware of what was going on in my head. I’ll tell you what I told her. Since I was young, I had a dream. In my parents’ house, there were many books. My father was a teacher, and he was always reading books – history, geography, everything. All the time, there were books on art. I loved looking at Gustav Doré’s paintings from the Bible. They influenced me very much.
I thought, ‘I also want to do that. I want to be an artist,’” he recounts.
“But I finished the army. I needed to be practical. I had good hands, so I decided to study mechanical engineering. Life makes you forget your dreams. I became the maintenance manager of a big factory here, making Simmons mattresses. I had a big office, a welder, a mechanic, I ordered parts from all over the world. I built them nice machines, just from visiting the production line and talking to people and finding out what they wanted. I made these machines from bottom to top. But I got to be 42, 43, and I started to think, ‘Oh my God, life is passing me by. What about my dream?’” So Avidor began living his dream, making evocative human figurative statues out of metal. Why metal and not, say, wood? “I don’t like wood. Wood is too easy,” he says, with another explosive laugh. “But it’s really about what metal can do. If you ask someone to make an arrow go through a ball that is suspended in midair, then I must ask you what other material will let you do this? Metal lets you express your imagination to the fullest. It’s a medium of almost unlimited possibilities.”
Avidor works with strips of iron of different lengths and varying degrees of thickness. Despite the fact that these strips must be cut, bent and then welded together, he claims that this is not particularly hard physical work. “I have tools that cut, bend and weld.” The trick, he says, is figuring out where to put the various pieces in order to achieve the effect he is aiming for.
“It’s like a very big jigsaw puzzle.”
SO FAR, the pieces of those puzzles have been coming together nicely. Avidor has participated in several group and solo exhibitions in Israel, among them “Creating on Borrowed Time” at the Acre Festival for Israeli Theater, “A Close-Far Perspective” in Kfar Saba’s city park and “The Sculpture Walk” in Jerusalem’s Mamilla Mall. A permanent solo exhibition of Avidor’s sculpture, “Impressions in Space,” began recently on the campus of Ahva College.
Some of Avidor’s recent creations catch our eye as we wend our way carefully around his statue-cluttered yard. We notice a rather sad-looking Moses holding up the Ten Commandments.
The artist explains, “All the norms are being broken here today. You see the [former] president? The finance minister? They’re in jail. Something is very wrong. So I took Moses, the two tablets in his hand, saying things like, ‘You shall not steal.’ And you see that he’s in a position in front of a crowd that is doing very bad things. He wants to stop them. He’s saying, ‘Look, it’s written here: Don’t steal.’ I also made him sad. His head is bent in sorrow. He’s not angry, he’s desperate. Most people I’ve showed this to don’t like it. My brother didn’t like it. My sister who has become haredi and lives in Bnei Brak didn’t like it. But the more people don’t like it, I start to like it. I have a conflict with most of my statues, but I start to like them when people complain.”
Near the door of the workshop lies a statue of Adam – a companion piece to an Eve statue that stands out in the yard – and beyond that is a mind-boggling statue of Icarus, the Greek mythological figure who attempted to fly with man-made wings, only to crash to earth when he flew too high and too close to the sun. We see this tragic figure literally crashing to earth at the very moment of impact.
Avidor definitely has his lighter side, however, and many of his statues are whimsical. One is posed on bended knee, offering his heart – his actual heart – which he has pulled out of a convenient little compartment in his chest, covered by a small metal door.
Another statue, from his Kfar Saba park exhibition, depicts a man on his way to work, carrying his briefcase and being moved by marionette strings suspended in the air above him.
Avidor expects to create depictions of Job and Abraham in the near future, but not right away.
“I’m not starting new ones. I want to clear the table first,” he says.
He waves an arm around the yard and explains, “Many of these statues were supposed to be finished last year. I gave myself a deadline at the end of last year. But these statues are very time-consuming. You can’t start work on a statue and finish it after one month. It’s a process. You have to walk away from the work and come back after one month. Then you see it in a different way.”
Some six years after quitting his job and starting to sculpt, Avidor is still a “struggling artist.” He continues to learn, each and every day, how difficult it is to break into the art world, how hard it is to get exhibited, and how nearly impossible it is to make a living from art in Israel today. One thing is certain, though: He will not give up his dream.
“I’ll tell you little story,” he says. “I have a neighbor who many, many years ago was an artist. He also made sculptures from metal. But he needed to eat, he needed to support a family. So people came to him asking him to make this thing, that thing. And once you start to go that way, your heart becomes dead.
Today, he runs a metal shop – making things, fixing things – and he dreams of the days long ago when he was an artist. What kind of life is that?”

For further information about Nitzan Avidor, as well as contact details, visit his website: www.nitzanavidor.com.