Menashe Kadishman was born in 1932 in Israel.
Kadishman is an Israeli sculptor and painter. From 1947 to 1950 he studied with the Israeli sculptor Moshe Sternschuss at the Avni Institute in Tel Aviv and in 1954 with the Israeli sculptor Rudi Lehmann in Jerusalem. In 1959 Kadishman moved to London and studied there in St. Martin’s School of Art and Slade School of Art. He remained in London until 1972 and had his first one-man show there in 1965 at the Grosvenor Gallery. Kadishman is most known for his beautiful metal and iron large-scale simplistic urban sculptures. He is inspired by biblical stories such as the Sacrifice of Itzhak, which are creatively transformed to new narratives.

Kadishman sculptures of the 1960s were Minimalist in style and so designed as to appear to defy gravity. This was achieved either through careful balance and construction, as in Suspense (1966), or by using glass and metal so that the metal appeared unsupported, as in Segments (1968). The glass allowed the environment to be part of the work.
Over the last forty years he has had numerous exhibitions across the world in museums and leading international galleries. He represented Israel at the Venice Biennale in 1978 when he created for the Israeli pavilion a herd of blue metal sheep. In his youth, between 1950 and 1953, Kadishman worked as a shepherd on a Kibbutz. This experience with nature, sheep and shepherding had a significant impact on his later artistic work and career. In 1995, he began painting portraits of sheep, each one different from the next. These instantly-recognizable sheep portraits soon became his artistic “trademark”.

In 1995 Kadishman won Israel’s most honorary prize, the Israel Price for Plastic Arts, which was added to a long list of prizes he won previously. His works are in collections of renowned museums across the world.
Kadishman currently lives and works in Tel Aviv.