Liad Shadmi's Monograph Rescues Israeli Modernist Eli Gross from Obscurity

Eli Gross | Total Designer, a bilingual monograph in English and Hebrew, is set to be released with the backing of Kickstarter. The editor, Liad Shadmi, came across Gross's creations through his widow and gathered unique archival content, much of which is being published for the first time. Gross received his training at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague from 1962 to 1966 and was part of Total Design from 1969 to 1972, influencing Rotterdam's visual landscape and the Dutch Pavilion at Expo 70. After relocating to Israel in 1972, where corporate identity was largely artist-led, he designed the 1975 Kupat Holim logo, which abstracted the Star of David and is still in use today. The book also explores figures like Otto Treumann and Willem Sandberg, along with the evolution of sans-serif Hebrew typography, illustrating the waning of Modernism in Israel.