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Dani Karavan has become one of the most prolific and adept of public sculptors. His early Negev Monument in Israel is a large-scale essay in the architectural qualities of sculpture; at the Venice Biennale in 1976 his international reputation was confirmed by the Environment for Peace, which included water, olive trees and wind organs. Location is very important to Karavan, not just in terms of landscape, but of history too. The physicality of his creative process is matched to the site: ‘to feel, to listen, to smell, to touch, to walk through’. With Passages, Homage to Walter Benjamin, 1990-94, Karavan reached a sublime point of relationship between place (the cultural theorist Benjamin committed suicide at the site), text (some of Benjamin’s own words) and life, in the form of a single carefully-sited olive tree. Such potency is rare indeed in public sculpture.
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