Gerda Rubinstein was born in Berlin in 1931 to a Christian mother and a Jewish father. The family moved to Amsterdam in 1933, but her father was taken by the Nazi regime and later died in Monowitz. Gerda first worked in a pottery and then in the studio of Wessel Couzijn. She attended the Rijks Academie, gaining a grant which enabled her to study in Paris under Ossip Zadkine. Returning to Amsterdam she was awarded her first public sculpture commissions.
Having visited Jerusalem where she met Ada Karmi Melamede, Gerda came to London in 1958 where she met her husband-to-be, Christopher Stevens, who had studied architecture at the Architectural Association with Ram Karmi. From the late 1960s onwards, she was particularly active in Essex, receiving numerous commissions for public sculptures from the Harlow Arts Trust and for the Gibberd Garden, Harlow, including a portrait of architect, town planner, landscape architect and art collector Sir Frederick Gibberd. Gerda’s warmly humanist, naturalistic sculptures remain very popular in Harlow – familiar and well-appreciated, they inspire real affection.
As Gerda herself explained: “My sculptures are almost always of people, getting my inspiration from where I live. I have also made portraits and modelled birds and animals. I hope that the work, which is generally figurative, will be self-explanatory without the need for titles. I have come to realise that the sense of freedom and hope that I experienced as a teenager in Holland, after five years of occupation in World War II, has really never left me and that it still colours my work”.
Roger Lee of Parndon Mill in Harlow, who exhibited her work and knew Gerda personally, will be in conversation with Monica Bohm-Duchen, art historian and founding director of Insiders/Outsiders, to introduce us to the touching life story and artistic evolution of this still little-known woman émigré sculptor.
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