Kosso Eloul
Section E, Lot 443
Toronto Necropolis
An Israeli/Canadian post-war sculptor, Kosso Eloul’s monumental geometric sculptures can be found in Canadian cities such as Toronto, Kingston, Montréal and Ottawa. His sculptures can also be found in Los Angeles, New York, Miami, Tokyo, Jerusalem and Mexico City. Born in 1920 in Mourom, Russia Eloul moved to Tel-Aviv, Israel at the age of four. He began his formal art training under Israeli sculptor Yitzhak Danziger in 1938. In 1939, Eloul moved to the United States to study at both the Art Institute of Chicago and the Chicago School of Design. He studied with professors such as architect Frank Lloyd Wright and Bauhaus professor Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. Between the years of 1943 and 1948, Kosso Eloul served in WWII and then the 1948 Palestine War of Independence (or War of Liberation), before returning to sculpting. He represented Israel at the 29th Venice Biennale in 1959, and following the First Sculpture Symposium in Yugoslavia in 1961, arranged something similar in the Negev Desert in 1962. In the 1960’s, Eloul started developing his signature style of balanced, geometric metal sculptures, which earned him commissions in Israel, Canada and the United States. He met his future wife, Canadian artist Rita Letendre in Spoleto, Italy in 1962 while working at the 5th Festival de Due Mondi, “Scultura Della Citta.” They were married two years later, and, lived in Los Angeles for a while, before settling in Toronto in 1969. Two of Kosso Eloul’s best-known works are Meeting Place, which sits at the intersection of Bloor and Church in Toronto, and Eternal Flame at the Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, Israel’s largest memorial to the Holocaust. Kosso Eloul passed away from heart failure on November 8, 1995 at the age of 75. The polished black granite work entitled Onward, which is the central feature of this small area of cremation graves, is, of course, the work of Kosso Eloul. It gives the impression of a figure in motion, and its message to visitors is to move onward, to go on with your lives.