Zadok Ben-David
Girl on the Run, 2022
Corten Steel

Zadok Ben-David plays with movement and illusion, transforming human-scale people into monumental symbolic figures. Girl On The Run is part of a larger body of work titled “People I Saw But Never Met” which shows people encountered on the streets of over 20 countries around the world. The people are hand-picked and anonymously photographed by the artist as a metaphor for the world’s diversity, and the plurality of ethnicities, languages, traditions, cultures, and religions that reside in our societies. Ben-David’s accumulation of real-life global people suggests the ways in which we are both isolated, yet always in relation to one another.

Zadok Ben-David (b. 1949) is an Israeli artist working in London. He was born in Beihan, Yemen; his family immigrated to Israel when he was an infant. He studied at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design from 1971 to 1973. He continued his studies at the University of Reading and Saint Martin's School of Art, where he studied sculpture and later taught, from 1977 to 1982.

In 1988, Ben-David represented Israel in the Venice Biennale. He has received many awards, including the Grande Biennial Prémio at the XIV Biennale Internacional de Arte de Vila Nova de Cerveira in Portugal in 2007, and the Tel Aviv Museum prize for sculpture 2005. In 2008, he was commissioned to make a sculpture for the Beijing Olympics.

Since 1980, Ben-David has had more than forty solo exhibitions. His works are held in the collections of public and private institutions in Europe, East Asia, the United States, Israel and Australia.

Commissioned by Miami World Center
Curated by Jeffrey Deitch & Primary.
Miami, 2022