Few contemporary artists have their work displayed at the front of the main hall of parliament. For 50 years, heads of state, presidents and hundreds of government ministers and Knesset members have delivered speeches against the backdrop of Dani Karavan’s creation, the large Galilee stones covering the wall behind the podium of the Knesset speaker. Tens of thousands of visitors from Israel and abroad have gazed at the creation from the balcony. Karavan is now asking that his work be taken down. “Sometimes I’m ashamed of having made it,” the laureate of the Israel Prize (1977) said on June 8.
He spoke several days after becoming the first non-Spanish artist to be awarded a prestigious Catalan prize for cultural contribution. Previous recipients were the likes of Pablo Picasso and Joan Miro. The prize was awarded to Karavan for “Passages,” an artwork he created in Portbou in Spain as a tribute to German-Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin at the site where he committed suicide.
