Being introduced to Ruth Bloch the person, the artist and being introduced to Ruth Bloch's art is a remarkably similar experience. Bloch, the artist, is warm, friendly and speaks of love and feelings. She stands a diminutive five-foot something and has long sandy hair that, while brushed, is not completely controllable. She is somber and serious in tone but can break into a beacon of a smile when discussing her children or early memories of Isreal. Her speech is enigmatic, filled with contradictions, but she is not. Ruth Bloch is a purist.

What I consider good art is not if it shows beauty or ugly things or war or cruelty - this is not what makes it more art than the rest. For me what makes art is pureness. If an artist can deliver something pure from the inner you - the less stages you have from the inner you to the art, the better.

Ruth Bloch was born in Israel in 1951. Her father, a musician and her mother, an artist, both escaped the Holocaust in Europe. Ruth grew up in a kibbutz where the community cared for the children and everyone worked to survive and build the very young nation. She lost her mother giving birth to her brother when Ruth was only nine years old.

She was an artist and left all her tools. I picked them up and I know that sounds symbolic but I felt I had to take care of my brother, my father and the art.

Reaching adulthood Ruth attended the Avny Art Institute in Tel Aviv as an avid painter. When she showed her professors what she had already accomplished as a sculptor they encouraged her not to take courses from them. They, and she, felt that Ruth had already developed her own style and that she should go her own way.

As Bloch began raising her own children she felt that the life on a kibbutz was too restrictive for them and her artistic development. She, the children and her husband, who is an expert agriculturist, left for the desert to grow produce for sale in Europe and America. This seclusion also offered Ruth the time she needed to develop her sculpture. But the time spent in the desert sun gave Ruth cancer and sent her to Tel Aviv for two years of medical treatments.

Ruth is very philosophical about this period and describes it as a blessing. Back in the city she was discovered by galleries and museums and her reputation as a major talent was born. For the last ten years that talent and immense hard work has taken her and her sculptures to nearly every point around the world. While she belongs to The International Women's Political Caucus and believes strongly in women's rights she has never felt discriminated against. The artist is aware that she is often the only woman artist in a particular exhibition and is always the only female sculptor.

I never considered myself a minority because I feel I can do anything. This never stopped me. I never felt less fortunate. People notice that I accomplish. Most sculptors are men. I'm in the foundry, I give them orders. I tell them what to do and they do it and we work very well together even though they are all men.

Having accomplished many intimate and large-scale works in bronze ("I like big works, even though I'm so small") using the traditional lost wax method, Ruth has now turned her attention to a combining, a synthesis of bronze and glass. In this process Bloch does two surprising and unusual things: she casts unique, one of a kind works, from a mold and she does each step herself. When a sculptor creates a mold it is traditionally to cast an edition and when a sculptor becomes as successful as Ruth Bloch, it is customary to oversee or even be absent when the artesians work is done. From the clay of the figures and the carving directly in wax of the tree branches to the blowtorch utilized to create the patinas; it is all Ruth Bloch.

I have to be in the foundry all the time. I weld the trees myself. I do everything at each stage. I create the mold for the glass, different from one another. I use colors that belong to the glass world and to the ceramic world. It's always an adventure. I now have a new glass and I go to create a new bronze for that unique glass. I challenge myself. I dream the trees during the night. When I look out at nature I don't see nature anymore. I see my trees with the glass, the colors, the coolness - I grow with each piece.

Bloch's growth is far easier to trace than her influences. Sculpture itself has laconically lagged behind all other post war media. Ruth has had little interest in either the literal sculpture as afforded by Duane Hanson or a return to romanticism championed by Frederick Hart. Although Bloch desires to stay as close as possible to her feelings she does not confuse emotionalism with naive technique as did Bernard Meadows or Kenneth Armitage. As a figurative sculptor, Bloch most closely relates to Henry Moore for his fluidity of line and his genius for making the massive delicate. Bloch's Fatherhood sculpture, which blends the human forms in an eternal circle, echoes Moore's ability to realize the full potential of the sculptural form. In its scale and weight Bloch's Family is reminiscent of Moore's Northhampton Madonna (1943/4). However, Bloch moves one step beyond Moore by allowing no separation between man, woman and child. For Bloch these figures are one; locked in an unending circle of life. Bloch also acknowledges Alberto Giacometti's influence. Bloch's stylized elongated figures and her highly textured patinas mark a direct path to the master Giacometti.

Bloch mirrors Giacometti's attitude about his art. Giacometti was a celebrated Surrealist with works such as Woman with Her Throat Cut(1932), but when he returned to the model and dedicated himself to the figure he lost favor with the Surrealists and effectively didn't exhibit again until 1948. Ruth Bloch risks dismissal by crossing the age-old intellectual taboo of combining form and function; art and craft. One cannot overemphasize how little Ruth cares about this risk. She finds great joy in creating the work and marvels at the public's voracious response.

There is something sublime about the serious artist creating usable art. Viewing Bloch's colorful bowls atop bronze trees with magical figures reading books or lifting a child to the heavens, the spirit of Picasso at Vallauris is not too distant a memory. The often dark Picasso was at his most whimsical and often poignant working in ceramics, creating images of doves, fish and owls on bowls, plates and wine decanters.

Bloch began functional works with a series of bronze bowls and coffee tables. Now that she has expanded her visual vocabulary with unique glassworks, the possibilities of expanding this fusion seem limitless to Bloch. Each correspondence from the foundry and each crate that arrives at the gallery fulfill the promise of Bloch; that she is growing with each work.

Whether in bronze or the combining of bronze with glass, Bloch's work offers a peaceful and pure way of seeing. Somehow seeing her feelings aids the viewer in experiencing their own. From the intimacy of Time Out to be Within to the grace and grandeur of Family, Bloch captures the experience of pure joy. Her imagery does not confound but affords comfort in contemplation and the warm embrace of loved ones.

From his first viewing of Ruth Bloch's union of bronze and glass, Rowland Weinstein committed his galleries to the acquisition of each piece Ruth accomplished. The exclusive offering by Weinstein Galleries of Bloch's glass and bronze work with this exhibition of her finest sculptures in bronze marks a milestone in the career of this gifted and innovative artist.

Artist's Statement: "I look around me. I look inside. I sense and absorb. From the internal vulnerable fountain of my feelings I create my art. I go through life, hand in hand with my art-work. We grow together."  —Ruth Bloch, December 2000

Article by Philip Allen: Director, Weinstein Gallery
from Ruth Bloch - Sculptor Catalog
published by Weinstein Gallery, San Francisco, CA ©2000