The first museum retrospective of noted Israeli artist Micha Ullman (b. 1939), Sands of Time, will open at the renewed Israel Museum in Jerusalem on 22 June. The exhibition, which spans Ullman’s fifty-year career in sculpture and drawing, will remain open to visitors of the museum through 12 November 2011.
Ullman, who was awarded the prestigious Israel Prize in 2009, is known for subterranean installations, some of which barely protrude from the ground, as well as his sculptures made of iron and sand – all of which address such universal themes as place and home, absence and emptiness.
Ullman achieved international recognition in 1995 for the deeply moving underground library void, created as a memorial in Berlin’s Bebelplatz, where the Nazis burned thousands of books on May 10, 1933. To celebrate the Israel Museum’s new retrospective, Ullman has created a 200-square-meter installation based on his own unique sand-throwing technique.
The Israel Museum is the largest cultural institution in the State of Israel and is ranked among the leading art and archaeology museums in the world. Founded in 1965, the Museum houses encyclopedic collections ranging from prehistory through contemporary art and includes the most extensive holdings of Biblical and Holy Land archaeology in the world, among them the Dead Sea Scrolls. In just 45 years, the Museum has built a far-ranging collection of nearly 500,000 objects through an unparalleled legacy of gifts and support from its circle of patrons worldwide.
In 2010, the Museum completed a comprehensive renewal of its campus led by James Carpenter Design Associates, New York, and Efrat-Kowalsky Architects, Tel Aviv, including the creation of new galleries, orientation facilities, and public spaces, and the complete reinstallation of its encyclopedic collections. The Museum also organizes and presents programming at its off-site locations in Jerusalem at the Rockefeller Archaeological Museum, where it presents archaeological artifacts from the Land of Israel, and at its historic Ticho House in downtown Jerusalem, a venue for exhibitions of contemporary Israeli art.
www.imj.org.il
