Corridor Contemporary

On this day, we remember the Shoah through the work of Igael Tumarkin, who confronts the loaded phrase “Arbeit macht frei”, forever tied to Auschwitz concentration camp and transforms it into a stark meditation on memory and identity.

In this work, history feels compressed like trauma carried quietly within. It is the original maquette for A Portrait of the Artist as a Mummy, later realized at the Hakone Museum of Art, where Tumarkin places himself inside that history, wrapped and preserved by it.

Between the intimate and the monumental, Tumarkin asks: how do we carry the past and how much of it carries us?

Igael Tumarkin
Macht Arbeit Frei, circa. 1990
Bronze and mixed media
33 9/10 × 43 3/10 × 19 7/10 in
86 × 110 × 50 cm