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Tel Aviv Museum of Art

No exit. The American artist George Segal (1924–) uses two stark figures in a barren landscape to render the binding of Isaac. Segal creates his ghostly sculptures by applying surgical plaster bandages onto live models and then reassembling the bandages. Segal’s contemporary version of the Akedah is suffused with dread, an effect heightened by the absence of the hand of God and of the ram— two elements common in most artistic renditions of the scene and harbingers of Isaac’s eventual reprieve.