The Park for Desert Sculpture in Mitzpe Ramon

The story

Along a kilometer and a half on the edge of the northern cliff of Makhtesh Ramon extends the Park for Desert Sculpture, one of the first of its kind in the world. It was born in the year 1962, when Mitzpe Ramon was only six years old as a permanent locality: the sculptor Kosso Eloul brought to the town ten artists from the country and from the world, and they lived in it ten weeks and sculpted on the spot the first sculptures of the open garden. In the year 1986 the sculptor Ezra Orion initiated the renewal of the park, and brought with him a further group of artists; in 1989 Zvi Dekel designed the park together with Orion. Today more than twenty works stand in it, some of them monumental sculptures and some of them works of environmental sculpture that use the line of the landscape as part of the work, and the materials are dolomite, limestone, kurkar, basalt and concrete. Among the works are “Field of Rocks” by Ezra Orion, “Light Sensor” by Jacques Moeschal — the only one in the park that is not of stone but cast in concrete — and a work without a title by David Fein, whose shape is a gate of five openings facing the view of the crater.

• Public art
• Desert