M.K.: I did my first studies as a sculptor with Moshe Sternschuss, but then in 1954 I met Rudi Lehmann. He came from Berlin to Israel and he had a master-attitude. In some way he worked like Ewald Mataré. He was thinking of the Middle East like an area, like a fluid culture – like there was the same cultural attitude from Assyria to Egypt. He was thinking in a way also of the attitude in Egyptian sculpture, which is very geometrical. If you look at the statues of one of the Pharaohs, it is like a circle, cylinder, triangular. Well, than a bit like Brancusi… In a few words this was his attitude to sculpture in general. But then the interesting point for me was, that the sensitivity came from the animals.

T.H.: Eugène Ionesco was probably the first to underline a special animal gaze in your paintings and sculptures.

M.K.: Yes, he said that the gaze was very «human». People like animals especially those they relate to, like the cat, sheep or donkey.

T.H.: This calls to mind first the way Lévinas’ distinguishes between face and «visage», and then to David Grossman’s The Smile of a Lamb from 1982, a widely discussed book in Israel during the 1980s.