Igael Tumarkin - B. 1933
Pieta at Kiriat Arba, 1979

Pieta at Kiriat Arba, 1979
Mixed media on paper, 55X75 cm, Signed and dated.

About The Artist:

sculptor and painter, is also a theoretican and stage designer, born 1933 in Dresden, Germany. Inmigrated to Israeli in 1935. The 1950s traveled Igael Tumarkin in East Berlin, Amsterdam, and Paris. He was deeply influenced by the metal sculpture of Julio Gonzalez. Upon his return to Israel in 1961, he became a driving force behind the break from the charismatic monopoly of lyric abstraction there. In 1967 participated in the Biennale of Sao Paulo and in 1968 in the Biennale in Tokio. Tumarkin created assemblages of found objects, generally with violent Expressionist undertones and decidedly unlyrical color. His determination to "be different" influenced his younger Israeli colleagues. The furor generated around Tumarkin's works, such as the old pair of trousers stuck to one of his pictures, intensified the mystique surrounding him. In the sculpture created in the seventies (exhibited in 1978 in The Israel Museum), Tumarkin defined the area of work that would reflect the internal contradiction within the Israeli man: on one side his belonging to the occidental culture and on another side his aspiration for integration to the place he lives in. His sculpture creates an environment that tends to be symbolic and is based on a combination of "materials from life" – earth, stones, Bedouin water skins, color ribbons like the ones that Jews and Muslims in the East use to tie sacred trees – and with "forms and materials of modern industry" - metal, glass, geometric forms. These kind of works promote a unique message: the importance of integration of a political, cultural and ecological ensemble as condition for survival.

Education

1954 Studied with Rudi Leheman, Ein-Hod

1955 Studied with Bertolt Brecht, Berliner Ensemble, Berlin

1955-57 Assistant to the designer Karl von Appen