Landscape, 1967
Abstract painter Reuven Berman was born into a Jewish family in Philadelphia, USA in 1929. In 1950, he moved to Israel, initially to take up an apprenticeship as a landscape gardener, then attending the Bezalel School of Art in Jerusalem, from where he graduated in 1956. Afterwards, he travelled in Mexico before returning to Israel and settling in Holon, Tel Aviv. From 1958 he began to turn towards abstraction, ultimately abandoning the conventional rectangular picture format in his paintings from the 1960s onwards, in favour of a circular or hexagonal format. In the 1980s he travelled around the Mediterranean and focused on adapting Judaic religious imagery into modern geometric art, also incorporating cross-cultural references and, after a visit to Paris in 1991, experimenting with three-dimensional art. In the same year, he added the Hebrew 'Kadim' to his name. From 1995, Reuven Berman Kadim specialised in digital screen printing, inspired by the Islamic method and by fractal theory. In 1970 he settled in Rehovot, where he lived and worked until his death in 2014.
