Kosso Eloul was born in Russia in 1920, but from the age of four grew up as an Israeli. At the age of 18 he studied sculpture for a year with Yitzhak Danziger, who was considered one of the founders of the Canaanite movement, which advocated the cultural and artistic return to pre-Jewish sources, those which thrived in the Fertile Crescent and the Near East.
At 19, Eloul went to study at the Chicago Art Institute, in New York and in Philadelphia. Upon his return to Israel in 1946 he settled in Emek Yizra’el, and was associated with the New Horizons group, which had declared its intention to implement modernism and mainly the abstract into Israeli art.
Eloul brought to Israel innovation and his strong tendency toward abstract art, which began to take control of the American art world during his studies. He was renowned in the Israeli art world and was awarded the Dizengoff Prize for sculpture in 1951.
In 1959 Eloul represented Israel at the Biennale in Brussels and in the years 1959 to 1960 he participated in the international sculpture symposia in Austria, Germany and Yugoslavia, where he met some of the artists who later took part in the symposium on the ridge of the crater.
Kosso Eloul died in 1995 in Toronto, Canada.
Within a square, limestone rock, facing the landscape, Kosso Eloul created a roughly chiseled, hollow shape, eye-like sculpture. The ‘eye’ gazes down onto the primeval landscape of the Ramon Crater in an almost ritualistic silence.
An eye-in-the body is a motif found in other statues by Eloul. The image is meant to direct the spectator’s attention to the concept of the gaze in its various manifestations: art explains the world through observation, a ‘gaze’, and allows itself to gaze inside at itself, and in this case, a symbolic gaze at the landscape.
The symbolism of the stone eye’s gaze and the abstraction of the concept of observation by the sculpture’s abstract design fills the spectator’s view with complex and vivid content. The stone eye is the spiritual and physical eye of the spectator.
Kosso Eloul nicknamed the sculpture ‘Zarathustra’ (who was the prophet of the official religion of ancient Persia) probably under the influence of the Canaanite movement he was akin to at the beginning of his career.
