Micha Ullman

Micha Ullman was born in 1939 in Tel Aviv

Ullman was born in Tel Aviv in 1939 to Lili and Yitzhak Ullman, German Jews who moved to Mandate Palestine in 1933. His siblings Gad and Tirza Ullman are also artists. As a teenager he attended the Kfar HaYarok agricultural school.

He served in the paratrooper Nahal and later joined a Nahal group at Kibbutz Erez. From 1960 to 1964 he studied at Bezalel in Jerusalem. In 1965 he studied etching at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London.

In 1966 he worked as an illustrator and graphic designer at Maariv. He taught at Bezalel from 1970 until he was dismissed in 1978 after the student revolt. He later taught at the University of Haifa, the Technion and the State Academy of Fine Arts Stuttgart, where he was professor of sculpture from 1991 to 2005.

In the 1970s he began making earth works based on digging pits, including the 1972 Metzer-Messer project. He showed at the 1980 Venice Biennale. His Empty Library memorial on Bebelplatz in Berlin, marking the Nazi book burnings, opened in 1995.

In 2004 he created the Last Scion memorial on Mount Herzl. He received the Israel Prize for sculpture in 2009. He is married to Mira and lives in Ramat Hasharon.