Memorial for the book burning, 1995 Berlin, Germany
A Chair, 1989 stome Tel Aviv University, Israel
Ground, 1987 Marl, Germany
Havdalah, 1988 iron and gravel Tefen Open Museum, Israel
Window, 1999 concrete iron and glass Tel Aviv Museum of Art
Micha Ulman was born in Tel Aviv to German Jews who immigrated to Mandate Palestine in 1933. As a teenager, he attended the Kfar HaYarok agricultural school.In 1960-1964, he studied at Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem. In 1965, he attended the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London, where he learned etching. Ullman is married to Mira, and lives in Ramat Hasharon, Israel.
Ullman rarely creates sculptures above ground level; he sinks his works into the earth. He has incorporated dirt and sand into his materials since 1972, beginning with an exchange of soil between an Israeli and a Palestinian village. His works are often small, rather than monumental (he uses the term “miniment” to describe them).
Ullman's work in the 1970s was varied and included a work in which earth was exchanged between an Arab village and an Israeli Kibbutz (Metser). After a phase of highly personal "landscape" drawing, he began his series of earth sculptures (first displayed at the Venice Biennale of 1980). They resemble crumbling "Graves", "Shelters", and "Chairs". From the early nineties, Ullman increased references to the concept of time in sculpture, to history in general and the Holocaust in particular. Images of pits and constructions emphasized the dimension of the vacuum and the lack of human structures. Work "library" (1995), for example, located in the square of Babylon in Berlin, Ullman has created a directory structure underground, empty white shelves.
In 1997, Ullman completed a synagogue memorial in collaboration with Zvi Hecker and Eyal Weizmann, commemorating the former Lindenstraße synagogue in Kreuzberg. Another of his creations is "Hochwasser" ("Flooding") on a small island near the Werra River in Germany. It was inspired by a boat Ullman saw there with a sign on it stating it had a capacity of up to seven passengers. Ullman's father, Yitzhak, who had lived nearby, immigrated to the Land of Israel with his seven siblings in 1933.
