"Sandwerk" is an exhibition about books, or more precisely about the absence of books. Micha Ullman, born in Tel Aviv in 1939, has created a sand pile in the Leonhardi Museum that makes the traces of these books visible on an area of 100 square metres like a large drawing. Using the fine-grained red sand of his native Israel, the artist creates shadows of this absence. Ullman himself compares the process he has developed to photography, in that time, distance and light are defining moments in this work. However, it can also be understood as a flat relief.
These ambiguous references are characteristic of Micha Ullman's work. The subject of the book is of central importance to Jewish religion and culture. Judaism was the first religion to be revealed through a "book" - the Torah. At the same time, the book is a metaphor. And its destruction a reality. Understood in this way, the work also refers to the first book burning by the National Socialists on 8 March 1933 in Dresden and is linked to Ullman's "Library" memorial on Bebelplatz in Berlin.
Micha Ullman, a member of the Berlin Academy of Arts and professor emeritus at the Stuttgart State Academy of Art, lives near Tel Aviv. He has become renowned far beyond the borders of his own country and far beyond those of Germany, and not only for the aforementioned memorial to the book burning on 10 May 1933. In 1980, he represented his country at the Venice Biennale, and twice at the São Paulo Biennial. Invitations to ‘documenta 8’ (1987) and ‘documenta IX’ (1992), as well as to other major international exhibitions, have repeatedly attested to the stature of his work. In 1989, he was in Berlin as a DAAD scholarship holder. In addition to the memorial on Bebelplatz, he created two further works for public spaces in Berlin: the sculpture ‘Niemand’ (1990) on Lindenstraße opposite the Jewish Museum, and ‘Blatt’ (1997), which, not far from there at 48–50 Axel-Springer-Straße, uses benches to trace the outline of a synagogue destroyed by the Nazis. Works for public spaces have also been created in other German cities such as Stuttgart, Heidelberg, Bamberg and elsewhere. His work has also been exhibited internationally: in Italy, Finland, Australia, Poland and elsewhere. The Museum Wiesbaden honoured him with a major exhibition in 2003, and a retrospective of his work is currently on display at the reopened Israel Museum in Jerusalem. Among other honours, the artist received the Käthe Kollwitz Prize from the Berlin Academy of Arts in 1995 and the Israel Prize in 2009, the country’s highest honour for the arts.
Ullman, who comes from a family that emigrated from Thuringia to Palestine in 1933, has devoted his entire body of work to questions of memory, disappearance, absence and traces. The red sand of his homeland is the central motif of his work, which is often reduced to the bare essentials, yet cannot simply be categorised as minimalism. Every gesture, every form carries a meaning that extends far beyond the material itself, without, however, being open to symbolic interpretation. Micha Ullman’s works are open spaces for thought and remembrance. His aesthetic is rooted in Jewish culture and, at the same time, can be experienced universally.
The awarding of the Gerhard Altenbourg Prize by the Lindenau Museum Altenburg was the occasion for the double exhibition in Altenburg and Dresden. From 11 September to 11 December, the Lindenau Museum presented the exhibition "Bergwerk" (Mine), for which Micha Ullman created a new expansive work that refers to his family's Thuringian origins.
