Playing with Curves

Making art is part of searching for something that is not concussed, and it's the part of the obsession with the process of making something and an internal thought process.

As a sculptor, a painter, or any person who repeatedly makes something over decades, you start to see a pattern. I like pushing myself not to repeat a form or combination of forms even when I feel they work well. Sometimes, it's hard to resist the temptation of success.

People often think that I don’t see the ease of what works. When I paint every day, I notice that my pallet is connected, so ill work on a series for a year or two exploring forms and shapes and try not to repeat what looks good because what’s important in making something is not making it look good it's creating something that moves me.

I like painting birds because they are a simple combination of shapes and quickly recognizable, but my interest is what they make us see. Crows have a special meaning for me, and I had a few falcons and later a pet crow as a young adult. Gulliver had real intelligent and would interact with the whole family teasing the people who were not conferrable with him and being affectionate and playful to the ones he liked. He came faster when called than any dog I ever owned.

So over the years, I never look at a picture of a crow. My painting of crows are typically in groups, and it’s in their combination that intrigues me. So I view them like human forms we know so well and place them concerning themselves and humans. Crow 1 was in oils and painted in 1975 when I was finishing art school in Israel. Now, I don’t take as much time, and my crows are less real in their interpretation of reality and more real in their passion for paint and form.

-Edo Rosenberg

Dama Gallery proudly presents TRAVEL, a focused exhibition dedicated to artist Edo Rosenberg and his monumental Core-10 steel sculpture Travel (1998) — the centerpiece that gives the exhibition its name. On view October 1, 2025 through February 16, 2026, this landmark presentation honors the sculpture’s powerful history and its deeply personal origins.

Towering at approximately 10 feet in height, Travel was forged from Rosenberg’s enduring fascination with a memory: massive ship propellers once seen outside a shipyard in Oakland, California. He never photographed these propellers — instead allowing the image to evolve internally for over a decade before giving it form in his Marin studio.

Rosenberg describes this as his “memory process”, a way of creating that relies not on reference but on recollection refined by time. His sculptures become monuments not to objects themselves, but to the feeling those objects imprinted on him.

“I don’t recreate what I saw — I build what it became inside me,” says Rosenberg. “I chase the form that carries the memory forward.”

Travel made its celebrated debut in Rosenberg’s solo exhibition at the legendary O.K. Harris Works of Art in New York, directed by Ivan Karp, the dealer who historicized Pop Art giants such as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. The work received strong critical recognition and later exhibited at the Oakland Museum of California Sculpture Court and the Oshman Family JCC in Palo Alto. For many years, it stood outdoors along San Geronimo Valley Drive, becoming a familiar landmark for locals and travelers alike.

Presented in Ventura for the first time, Travel is accompanied by two recent sculptures — Playing with Curves (2023) and Dancing the Square (2023) — which illuminate Rosenberg’s continued evolution while honoring the formative visual language that shaped his early steel works.

Born in Tel Aviv and later a distinguished MFA graduate from the California College of Arts & Crafts, Edo Rosenberg has spent five decades developing a sculptural practice grounded in intuition, recollection, and the emotional power of form. His work is featured in significant public and private collections including Saks Fifth Avenue, the Oakland Museum of California, and the Falkirk Cultural Center, and he has been honored with awards such as the Ford Foundation Award of Merit and the Marin Arts Council Buck Fellowship.

With TRAVEL, the Gallery invites audiences to experience how memory becomes monument — and how a single image can carry a lifetime of movement, distance, and discovery.