In Boaz Vaadia’s quietly monumental work, stone rises layer by layer to describe figures with a serene and watchful presence. For over thirty years, he collected materials—often slate or bluestone—from the area around his SoHo studio in New York, where he immigrated in the 1970s. What others saw as discarded roofing tiles and landscaping debris, Vaadia saw as sedimentary rock formed over eons, the same as the stones underneath his childhood farm in Israel To Vaadia, stone was “the bone structure of the earth,” with an energy linked to the human soul. Each sculpture is the result of chiseling and stacking, a process recalling natural transformations that happen over geologic time as well as prehistoric construction methods that relied solely on cut and weight. Their titles, ancient names lifted from the Bible, are a nod to Vaadia's cultural heritage, his personal way of remembering his creations. Vaadia (1951–2017) exhibited internationally, with public installations at the Grounds for Sculpture in Hamilton, NJ, Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, Independence Park in Tel Aviv, and others. His work is included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Tokyo Metropolitan Teien Museum, among numerous other collections both private and public.
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