The intimate exhibition of Vaadia’s creations at London’s Connaught Brown gallery, with which he had been collaborating for a decade prior to his death, contained some strong examples from a practice that has changed relatively little since the 1980s, but failed for the most part to show off the late sculptor’s ability to express both feeling and formal finesse from a relatively limited creative process. A work such as Tirza (2013), for instance, which consists of a figure standing up straight with arms to the sides, shows the limitations of portraying the human form with a sculptural process that demands a certain verticality and attention to the distribution of weight—limitations that Vaadia apparently wished to replicate even when not strictly necessary, as this work is in fact an amalgam of blue stone and bronze. This said, the oversized head of the sculpture lends it a childlike quality, and thus a degree of personality.

The lack of precision that the artist’s chosen process implies can, especially when portraying non-human figures, give his works a totemic quality, revealing his interest in nature and at their best evoking nature itself. His 3 Grazing Sheep (2014), clustered with fat bodies and lowered heads, insinuate the land from which they feed and from which they have grown plump, and in Yoav With Dog (1989) and Baraq With Cat (2007), animals bring the otherwise stoic and perhaps overly stiff human forms down to earth. Another work, Grazing Horse (2014), however, strays too far from the underlying physicality of its subject, and does not manage to evoke the essence of the animal as do stronger examples by Vaadia—not exhibited here—such as Horse (Relief) (2015).