Michael Gross, sculptor and painter, was born in Tiberias, Israel in 1920. In the 1950s, after his return from studying sculpture in Paris, Michael Gross developed an approach which sought the essence of visual reality through a minimal number of masses of colour and the elimination of incidental details, seeking to convey the meaningful content of the subject observed. This approach was shared by Ori Reisman, who had studied with Gross in Paris.

Gross followed American abstract trends (especially Barnet Newman), but his quasi-abstract forms were always linked to reality, seeking only a subjective dialogue with their environment, as in his sculpture in the Simón Bolivar Park in Jerusalem. This unique interpretation...