Sculptor and Painter Menashe Kadishman Passes Away

The many works produced by the Israeli sculptor and painter Menashe Kadishman, who has died aged 82, often surprised and provoked, blurring the boundaries between art and non-art. At the 1978 Venice Biennale, he displayed a live flock of sheep stained blue (a "moving painting", he called it). He took care of the sheep through drawing on his experience as a shepherd on a kibbutz in his youth.

Sheep became a major motif in his art, especially in painting. And the story of the shepherd who turned into an artist stuck to his myth. Kadishman's large physique, wild beard and the loose short garment and sandals he used to wear in all weathers and circumstances enhanced his image of a child of nature.

In his sculptures, Kadishman developed a signature style of cut-out silhouettes made of steel, some reaching a height of 5 metres or more, somehow preserving the sensitive qualities of the line drawings from which they derived.

In 1997, the round, open-mouthed faces, made from iron, that had been part of his previous works were accumulated and spread on a gallery floor in Tel Aviv, with the title Shalechet - Hebrew for fallen leaves. This work grew and was exhibited elsewhere, culminating in a permanent installation of 20,000 pieces in Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum in Berlin. Walking on the metal head - as there is no other way of seeing it - is an unforgettable experience.

Kadishman experimented with works exploring the relationship between nature and art. A series of environmental works, The Forest (Montevideo, Uruguay, 1969; New York Central Park, 1970; Haus Lange Museum, Krefeld, Germany, 1972) combined man-made yellow painted plates with the natural environment. Going one step further, he painted a tree in yellow organic paint (Jerusalem, 1972).

Kadishman's sculpture spanned two different trends in the art of the second half of the 20th century. The first, concerned with its own form, materiality and gravity, peaked in the mid-1960s to mid-1970s, especially in Britain and the US, and Kadishman was a fluent contributor. Examples include the minimalist aluminium and glass sculpture Segments (1968) at the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the yellow painted Suspense (1966) at the entrance to the Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Uprise (1967-74) in the Habima National Theatre Square, Tel Aviv; and Suspended (1968-76) at the Storm King Art Center, New York.

The other trend, from the early 1980s, related to art as a carrier of meaning: myths, memories and narratives, personal and collective. The biblical theme of the sacrifice of Isaac was a major theme in Kadishman's sculpture of the 1980s, which developed from the paintings of sheep he had started doing in 1979 and continued until his last days. In the early 1990s he began a poignant series of works on a theme rarely approached by a male artist: birth. In these works the child is brutally detached, head down, from the mother's body in a moment of mutual pain.

Kadishman was born in Tel Aviv to Bilha, a teacher and painter, and Ben Zion Kadishman, an industrial worker and sculptor, who emigrated from Ukraine in the early 1920s. He received his first artistic training from 1947 to 1950 with the sculptor Moshe Sternschuss, one of the founders of the modernist art group New Horizons, and then with the sculptor Rudi Lehmann, known for his sculptures and prints of animals.

In 1959 Kadishman went to London to study at St Martin's School of Art, at the time the hub of the New Generation of British sculptors led by Anthony Caro. After a year or so he moved to the Slade School of Art and studied with Reg Butler. The transition of British sculpture from the figurative and mythical tendencies of the 1950s to the abstract, industrial-influenced works of the 1960s is apparent in Kadishman's early sculpture as he replaced bronze and stone with aluminium, glass and steel.

In 1967 Kadishman won the first prize for sculpture at the 5th Paris Biennale for young artists and in 1968 participated in Documenta 4 in Kassel, Germany.

Being a foreign artist in Britain was not easy in those days, as Kadishman related in the 2011 book on his sculptures by Marc Scheps. Being Israeli, without a British passport, prevented him from participating in official exhibitions, a painful experience that made him feel as if he did not belong in art circles. But it also had a liberating effect: "I suddenly understood that whether I followed or did not follow a certain trend, or was or was not influenced by a certain artist, my work emanated from within me - with no passports, permissions and accepted notions."

In 1965 Kadishman married Tamara Alferoff, a British psychotherapist, and they had two children, Ben and Maya. In 1972, the couple separated and he returned to Israel. His career prospered in the following years, both in Israel and internationally. In 1995 he was awarded his country's highest honour, the Israel prize.

He is survived by his children and six grandchildren.