(born Rosa Perlmutter, 1948, Regensburg, Germany – 2001, Tel Aviv)

Shosh Kormosh was a unique artist in the Israeli scene. Her hand-processed B/W photographs were painting-like, sensitive, and delicate. Her works employed distancing and metonymy to address bereavement, loss, the memory of the Holocaust of European Jewry, and the sense of loneliness in an alienated world. Artist Nurit David described Kormosh's photographs as a unique attempt by photography to discuss its absence, its innate problem, its variance from painting and sculpture, its dependence on an "object." This becomes obvious when observing the quasi-bourgeois objects plucked from their place, cut and pasted into a black or white "non world" where they hover, out of context, like a terrible reversal of Martin Heidegger's "being-in-the-world". These works are the most quintessential trauerarbeit (work of mourning) by artists who are second generation descendants of Holocaust survivors in Israeli art. Kormosh's contribution to the photographic discourse helped establish its status as a high medium in Israeli art.