When Edo Rosenberg begins working on a metal sculpture, he doesn’t have a specific design in mind — it’s all about how the interplay of the shapes feels to him.
“I don’t try to tell a story in my pieces,” he said. “I just like strong elements.”
In recent months, the Israeli American artist has created several pieces that are loosely connected by an anti-war theme. On Jan. 1, one of those pieces — a 600-pound steel sculpture titled “Desert Flower” that included elements resembling tank treads — was stolen from the parking lot of Rosenberg’s San Jose studio. He estimated he could have sold the finished piece for around $100,000.
The Mercury News reported that the alleged thief, who was later arrested and charged with grand theft, cut the artwork into pieces and sold the metal to a local scrapyard for $92. The company, Alco Iron & Metal Company, is the same one that Rosenberg frequently buys raw materials from.
“I’ve never had a piece stolen before, and my pieces have been outdoors in many different locations at many different times,” Rosenberg, 70, told J. in an interview at his studio on Monday. “I feel angry and violated and sad.”
He said he was temporarily storing the piece outdoors to add a rust patina to its surface. His daughters encouraged him to set up an online fundraiser to recoup his losses, but he decided against it.
“I just want to move on,” he said. “There’s more craziness in the world than stealing a piece of art.”
Born in South Africa and raised in Savyon, near Tel Aviv, Rosenberg served in a communications unit in the Israel Defense Forces. His father, psychologist Eddie Rosenberg, was a bombardier and navigator in the Israeli Air Force in 1948. His mother, Masha, was an artist.
Rosenberg attended an arts high school and graduated from the Avni Institute of Art and Design in Tel Aviv. He came to the U.S. in 1978 to study at the California College of the Arts and stayed after earning his master of fine arts in sculpture.
His freestanding wood and metal sculptures have been installed around the Bay Area, including at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco and the Oakland Museum of California. Two of his pieces are currently on display on the grounds of the Falkirk Cultural Center in San Rafael. In 2019, the Oshman Family Jewish Community Center in Palo Alto staged a retrospective of his work.
“He has a very simple yet profound language with the materials he works with,” Ronit Widmann-Levy, who organized the retrospective when she worked at the JCC, told J. “The community engaged with his sculptures in a beautiful way — children played on them, teenagers climbed on them — because there’s no problem touching the art.”
In addition to sculpting, Rosenberg is a painter. Widmann-Levy said his paintings are sought after by collectors around the country. “He has quite a following, but in his humble way he doesn’t speak a lot about it,” she said.
On Monday, Rosenberg showed off his 2,000-square foot studio, which was crammed with materials and equipment, including metal rollers, welding equipment and a gantry crane to move his heaviest pieces. He explained how he “draws” new sculptures using stainless steel, and then he fabricates shapes out of Cor-Ten steel and welds them together. (He said he likes this type of steel, also known as weathering steel, because it turns a “burnt” orange color after being exposed to the elements.)
Though he considers himself a secular Jew, two of the recently-completed pieces in his studio include elements he referred to as “shofars.” He also pointed out another piece in his anti-war series, which he said resembled the scope of a gun when viewed from a certain angle. Asked about the Israel-Hamas war, now in its third month, he said he opposes it and Israel’s right-wing government.
“I don’t feel like my art is that political,” he said. “I think I create a lot of good tension. Life is full of tension between hard and soft, and high and low, and anger and love.”
Rosenberg said he does not know if he will recreate the stolen piece, which he worked on for about three months — a process he documented on Instagram. He is focused now on showing more work, and he said he hopes to one day have a show at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco.
How can people who want to support him in the wake of the theft help out? “They should follow me on Instagram,” he said.