> > IGAEL TUMARKIN, "UNTITLED" c.1975
IGAEL TUMARKIN, "UNTITLED" c.1975
IGAEL TUMARKIN, "UNTITLED" c.1975
IGAEL TUMARKIN, "UNTITLED" c.1975
IGAEL TUMARKIN, "UNTITLED" c.1975
IGAEL TUMARKIN, "UNTITLED" c.1975
IGAEL TUMARKIN, "UNTITLED" c.1975
IGAEL TUMARKIN, "UNTITLED" c.1975

IGAEL TUMARKIN, "UNTITLED" c.1975

$450.00

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Description:

  • Edition: 9/50
  • Mixed Media on Paper
  • Date: c. 1975
  • Signed Lower Left
  • Sheet: 27 x 19  inches (68.6 x 48.3 cm)
  • Framed: 36 x 26 inches (91.4 x 66 cm)
  • Condition: Excellent
  • Framed under glass

The Artist: Igael Tumarkin (Israeli,1933 - 2021)

Igael Tumarkin was a towering, highly controversial Israeli painter, sculptor, and stage designer renowned for his avant-garde assemblages and profound impact on modern Israeli art. Born Yigal Tumarkin in 1933, in Dresden, Germany, to a Jewish mother and a non-Jewish German theater director, he immigrated to Mandate Palestine at the age of two. After serving in the Israeli Navy, he studied sculpture under Rudi Lehmann before traveling to East Berlin in 1955, where he worked as an assistant set designer for the legendary playwright Bertolt Brecht at the Berliner Ensemble. Following Brecht's death, Tumarkin moved to Paris and Amsterdam, where he encountered the burgeoning European "Junk Art" movement, which inspired him to begin constructing raw sculpture out of scrap metal, weapons, and discarded industrial detritus. His time in the theater heavily influenced his subsequent art, lending a dramatic, staging-like quality to his later, large-scale public monuments. He passed away in 2021, in Tel Aviv, Israel, concluding a prolific career that spanned more than six decades.

Upon his return to Israel in 1961, Tumarkin revolutionized the local art scene by introducing assemblage and raw expressionism. He famously integrated actual weapons, artillery shells, and machine parts directly into his sculptures to confront the continuous trauma, anxiety, and militarism of the region. One of his most iconic and defining public works is the massive, geometric iron-and-glass pyramid monument dedicated to the Holocaust and Heroism, located in Tel Aviv’s Rabin Square. Tumarkin was as famous for his abrasive personality and fierce, anti-establishment political views as he was for his art. His work frequently used shocking, visceral symbolism to critique war, religious orthodoxy, and state politics, rendering him a highly polarizing figure in Israeli public life who actively operated as a perennial dissident.

Igael Tumarkin was an exceptionally prolific printmaker who produced over three hundred prints, seamlessly translating the violent expressionism and raw assemblage techniques of his famous iron sculptures onto paper. Encouraged by the massive boom in American print studios during his travels in the 1960s—where he observed pioneers like Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg push the boundaries of the medium—Tumarkin developed a hybrid graphic style that stood at the crossroads of Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, Dada, and European Surrealism. Rather than treating printmaking as a secondary pursuit, his graphics functioned as intense, layered visual testing grounds. His mixed-media prints are instantly recognizable for combining free, aggressive brushstrokes and spontaneous paint drips with tactile, "non-art" materials like newspaper clippings, historical photographs, maps, text fragments, and everyday junk.

Tumarkin utilized a complex array of techniques, frequently blending photo-etching, drypoint, lithography, and silkscreen (serigraph) print surfaces within a single composition, to construct deeply political, provocative series that targeted war, state power, and cultural history. In seminal print cycles like his 1973 War and Crucifixion portfolios, he juxtaposed precise, Leonardo da Vinci-style anatomical and wireframe drawings (reflecting his early training) with harsh, visceral imagery of military conflict, gas masks, and industrial machinery. Other famous portfolios, such as Travel Log (1973), Polyhedron (1975), and his E=MC² lithograph sequence, showcased a fascination with mathematical symbols, geometric grids, and the classical Vitruvian Man, always fractured or marred by chaotic, raw intervention. These complex layers allowed him to achieve a unique psychological claustrophobia, utilizing the printing press to question the boundaries of societal violence and human existential dread.

Despite the constant public friction surrounding his persona, Tumarkin's monumental contribution to the visual arts earned him premier global acclaim. He was awarded the prestigious Dizengoff Prize for painting in 1961 and ultimately received the nation's highest cultural accolade, the Israel Prize for Sculpture, in 2004. Today, his works are prominent features of the Israeli landscape, with major outdoor sculpture installations gracing the Israel Museum in Jerusalem and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. His pieces also maintain a significant international footprint, held in premier global collections including the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Hakone Open-Air Museum in Japan.

The Story: From a private collector in Toronto.

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