In a series of stone sculptures, Roy Givati unites the power of the stone with the coarseness of the concrete and nature’s abstraction.Ten years of masonry and restoration studies in Carrara Italy trained Givati to work, confront and adapt to the stone’s character.

Carrara, located near marble quarries is a town built entirely of marble and functioning both as a location for the preservation, study, reproduction and reconstruction of the local stone sculpting tradition and as an industrial city for toothpaste and calcium rich pharmaceuticals. This artistic-concrete duality impacts Givati’s rational when approaching the stone.

Givati dedicates himself to the stone, surrenders himself to it. He is fully aware that he cannot insist on a preconceived form of his imagination because the wrong stroke will crack and crumble the stone. The delicate treatment of the hard substance drives him to create images reflecting the balance: a face trapped in material, flying balloon, intertwining olive tree roots etc.

Carrara marble, starring from Trajan’s Column and Rome’s Pantheon, through the Duomo and David’s statue in Florence to London’s Marble Arch, is a Metamorphic rock – the product of stone chemically modified by extreme conditions. The metamorphosis occurs as an unobserved secret in nature. When Givati sculpts a stone containing crevices, veins, colors and minerals, he is well aware that it is the product of thousands of years of natural transformation. In his sculptures, appearing from the outside to be unprocessed stone, Givati connects the sense of invisible mystery occurring in nature with the spiritual distillation process overgoing an artist working in stone.

The magnet and minerals that Givati plants in the stone influence the shapes emerging in the sculptural creative process. The magnet, usually radiating order in the world generates a small chaos in the sculpture resulting in an image morphing with time, light and between spectators.

Closing: 18.05.13