“In Uruguay I feel tied to a tradition, certain things were expected of me, one has responsibilities,” Gurvich remarked of his latercareer distancing from Montevideo and the Taller Torres García. “Israel gave me the possibility to feel free. . . . There, I felt that the images that surged spontaneously as I painted were valid. They proceeded from a zone one reaches through intuition and imagination.” Gurvich first traveled to the Kibbutz Ramot Menasche in Israel in 1955, returning with his family in 1964, and again to attend to his ailing parents in 1969. Although he was not himself devout, he found stimulation in his communal work as a shepherd, embracing the pastoral setting and deep-rooted Jewish culture as he explored Arcadian and religious themes—for example, peasants in tembel hats and Sabbath dinner tables—in his painting. Among Gurvich’s recurrent motifs was that of the couple, which appeared first in Israel (sometimes as “Javer y Javera,” in reference to the kibbutz) and continued following his return to Montevideo in 1956 and thereafter. He painted versions of Adam and Eve in varying degrees of proximity to the geometric style of the Taller, at times inflected with the more lyrical figuration characteristic of his work in Israel. In this painting, Gurvich adapted the Constructive Universalist precepts of the Taller to describe the modular, conjoined bodies of the primeval couple, articulated in red and white geometries shaped by a bounding black line. A meditation on the cosmic origins and duality of humankind, Adam and Eve also presents a paean to love and to the secular family, perhaps partly in celebration of the birth of his son Martín in 1963. José Gurvich was born in Lithuania and immigrated to Uruguay with his family in 1933. He enrolled at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes in 1942, studying under José Cúneo, and joined the Taller Torres García in 1944, participating in the group’s twentieth exhibition the following year. Alongside artists including Julio Alpuy, Francisco Matto, and Gonzalo Fonseca at El Taller, he worked in ceramics and furniture design and taught drawing and painting. Gurvich also collaborated with the theater community in Montevideo, designing the scenery for Minnie la candida (1953) and the set for Dos en el tejido (1957), among other productions. He traveled across Europe between 1954 and 1956 and spent a year living as a shepherd at the Ramot Menasche Kibbutz in Israel before returning to Montevideo and resuming his position at El Taller. Gurvich departed from constructivist precepts at the Kibbutz, stimulated by the pastoral setting, and entered into an experimental period in his work around 1960, deploying constructivism within different styles, genres, and media. Gurvich painted a number of large-scale constructivist murals in the early 1960s, the largest of which was prepared on wood panels for the Caja de Pensiones del Frigorífico del Cerro (presently installed at the central branch of the Banco de Previsión Social in Montevideo). He returned to the Kibbutz with his family in 1964, painting and working as a shepherd, and made frequent visits to Tel Aviv. Back in Montevideo in 1966, he established a workshop at his home that became known as El Taller Montevideo. There, he trained a new generation of Uruguayan artists and continued his work in ceramics. In 1969 he traveled to Europe and to the Kibbutz before settling permanently a year later in New York, where he renewed contact with Taller members Alpuy, Fonseca, and Horacio Torres and completed a series of paintings based on the Jewish festivals.