David Gerstein (Israeli artist)

David (Dudu) Gerstein (Hebrew: דוד (דודו) גרשטיין; born November 14, 1944) is an Israeli painter, sculptor, draftsman, and printmaker. He began as a figurative painter and was recipient of the Israel Museum Prize for illustration. At the end of the 1970s, he wished to expand the limits of two-dimensional painting, into painting in three dimensions. He began cutting out the main subjects of each painting and, to cancel the background, creating unique and iconic cutout images, free-standing in space, without the standard and traditional square frame.

That led him to work in sculpture, mostly in wood and using industrial paint as coating. Through the use of primary colors and subject matters from our day-to-day life, he created a variation of personal pop-art style, which he defined as second-generation pop-art. Following the path of Roy Lichtenstein, Tom Wesselmann, and David Hockney, Gerstein similarly aimed at creating his personal post-pop art style, and left behind the monochromatic palette of oil and watercolors and used instead vibrant, design-oriented colors.

From 1980 to 1995, he created mostly free-standing wooden sculptures, which he later abandoned when he found laser-cutting technology. By that, he pioneered the use of laser cutting in art and was the first artist to use multi-layered cutout steel wall-sculptures.

Simultaneously to his wall-sculptures, Gerstein had a great interest in sculpture in public spaces. He created more than 40 sculptures in public squares and plazas in Israel alone. This led him to create many more large-scale outdoor sculptures in England, France, Sweden, Italy, China, South Korea, and other countries.

His art was shown in museums around the world, beginning in Israel Museum in 1987. In 2016 he won Taiwan's Artistic Creation Award. His sculptures of bicycle riders were purchased by Lance Armstrong, and were mentioned in Stephen King's writings. His outdoor sculpture "Momentum" is Singapore's tallest public sculpture.