Boaz Vaadia (1951–2017), the internationally acclaimed sculptor, amassed a prodigious body of work over his 40-year artistic career. With Boaz Vaadia: Sculpture, Grounds For Sculpture in Hamilton, New Jersey, presented the first retrospective exhibition of his indoor and outdoor works in 2016 in a comprehensive survey of the artist’s journey from abstraction to figuration. Detailing 125 works installed in two buildings and throughout the 42-acre sculpture park, the exhibition’s color catalogue presents Vaadia’s ritualistic and highly personal early works, his later sculptures in stone, slate, and bronze, and his explorations of the ancient genre of bas-relief. With the global recognition his art has received, he continued working at the edge, discovering new possibilities in the constantly shifting grounds of his sculpture. Boaz Vaadia: Sculpture is a celebration of the artist’s long and prolific career, and his unwavering advancement of his art.

Wendy Steiner is the Richard L. Fisher Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, specializing in interrelations between visual and verbal art. She is the author of numerous books including The Real Real Thing: The Model in the Mirror of Art (2010) and Venus in Exile: The Rejection of Beauty in 20th-Century Art (2001). Tom Moran is the chief curator and artistic director at Grounds For Sculpture in Hamilton, New Jersey. A sculptor in his own right, he has lectured on public art around the country and has taught at Rutgers University as well as at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.

Contents: 7
Acknowledgments | Boaz Vaadia: 9
Foreword | Tom Moran, Chief Curator, Grounds For Sculpture: 11
Boaz Vaadia: Grounds For Sculpture | Wendy Steiner: 15
Director’s Acknowledgments | Gary Garrido Schneider, Executive Director, Grounds For Sculpture: 37
Plates: 41
Early Works, 1971–1985: 43
Works in Stone, Slate, and Bronze, 1985–2015: 73
Bas-relief Works, 2014 to the Present: 111
Exhibition Checklist: 117
Brief Biography: 120
Selected Solo Exhibitions: 121
Selected Group Exhibitions: 123
Outdoor Installations and Public Art: 127
Selected Collections: 130
Grants, Fellowships, and Awards: 132
Selected Bibliography: 133
Photograph Credits: 134
Copyright Page: 136

From the mid-1980s and over the past three decades, Vaadia has been fixated on harnessing the natural forces of balance and gravity explored in his earlier works to new sculptural works depicting the human figure. Even though using the figure as a subject in his work had been of interest to him for some time, Vaadia seized it as a subject in the next phase of his work to highlight the true source of his inspiration and focus, the material. His concept centers on stacking thick, quarried bluestone slabs in carefully planned and organized renditions of the figure, constructed in such a way that the force of gravity is in harmony with the balanced layers forming the composition. When complete, the apparition of the figure consists of an intricate myriad of stone layers that stand in harmonious respect for the natural formation of the ancient sedimentary stone he uses.