Ruth Bloch

Ruth Bloch is an Israeli sculptor, born in 1951, known for figurative bronze sculpture and for one-of-a-kind works that fuse cast bronze with kiln-formed glass. She was raised on a kibbutz by a musician father and an artist mother, and took up her mother's tools as a child. At the Avni Institute of Art in Tel Aviv, her professors saw that she had already found her own style as a sculptor and encouraged her to go her own way. She has had solo exhibitions in San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Paris and Jerusalem, and her work has been shown at the Cornell Museum in Delray Beach and the Skirball Museum in Los Angeles.

Bloch works in the traditional lost-wax method and, unusually, does every stage herself. She sculpts the figures in clay, carves tree branches directly in wax, welds the trees, makes each glass mold and torches the patinas. She casts from molds, but each bronze-and-glass piece is unique. Writers have compared her fluid line to Henry Moore's. Studio E Gallery in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, represents Ruth Bloch.