IGAEL TUMARKIN

Catalog #: 22
Website: 

Image:

Title:Kafka
Year: 2000
Value: $3000  
Size: 62x47 cm (without frame:49x36 cm)
Description: mixed technique on hand-made paper


About the Artist: 
Much of Igael Tumarkin’s (b. 1933) extensive corpus is a powerful and painful engagement with the figure of the “cultural icon” and with that of the artist as one duty-bound to undertake an ongoing aesthetic and political dialogue with the great personalities of human history. Tumarkin combines pop and post-Dada’s language of photography, collage, and text with an expressionistic use of drawing and color, in order to pose an antithesis to mass culture and to examine the way in which meaning is cast in the image – and not, as in pop art, to prove that the image is emptied of meaning. Tumarkin insists that art emerges from a cultural continuum, and his stance is at once cosmopolitan and local. Torn between his Jewish and his German roots, he investigates the constant tension, as well as the dialogue, between Judaism and Christianity. His works deal with cultural icons – Jewish and non-Jewish, European and Israeli. The present exhibition features works from the 1980s and 90s dealing with writers Yosef Haim Brenner and Franz Kafka, philosopher Walter Benjamin, and playwright Hanoch Levin.

Tumarkin’s oeuvre often reflects upon the place of the artist himself as a cultural hero and meditates upon issues having to do with the nature and destiny of the cultural hero – and in the works before us, of the Jewish cultural hero – a question that arises indirectly from Warhol’s Jewish personalities series as well. Both Kafka and Benjamin worked from within German culture as well as Judaism. In the works before us, Tumarkin discusses their tragic fate, the violence that characterized their era and which became a subject of their own inquiries (see Walter Benjamin’s work on the poet Gertrud Kolmar, a relative of his who was murdered in Auschwitz), and the correspondences between them and other cultural heroes of their time (an example being that between Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht). The violent death of Yosef Haim Brenner in the prime of his life dictates his portrait, his expression reminding us of the crucified Jesus. The portrait of Hanoch Levin is densely packed with bold, carnivalesque colors that resonate with the reversal of high and low, poetic and vulgar, that exists in Levin’s work, part of his criticism on the human condition.