Zilberman announces representation of German artist Judith Raum. Judith Raum’s artistic practice is marked by a strong research-based and interdisciplinary approach. Raum works in installation and lecture performance with a focus on abstract and figurative painting and drawing to be included into her space and time-based work. She builds detailed narratives that reference economic and social history, postcolonial critique, medium specificity, and conditions of artistic production. After extensive artistic research into German economic colonialism in the Ottoman Empire as well as projects connected with notions of textility, she lately concentrated on the textile workshop at the Bauhaus.
The gallery first started working with Judith Raum for the Transit exhibition, curated by Dr. Lotte Laub and Susanne Weiß. In the exhibition, the artist showcased four colored-pencil drawings, titled Iguana, pick up on motifs from the 1965 novel of the same name by Italian writer Anna Maria Ortese (1914–88) and show us a choreography of desire. In her novel, Ortese connects questions being posed in the discourse on ecology with the sketching of a sexuality that transgresses prevailing norms. Iguana describes in detail the vulnerable being of a female iguana, who lives on a hitherto unmapped island called Ocaña in slave-like conditions and yet dares to make efforts at rebellion. In her large-format drawings, Raum’s lucid layerings of color reinforce the ambiguity of the subject and the fable-like character of her literary source.
Judith Raum (b. 1977) studied painting and fine arts at the Staedelschule, Academy of fine Arts, Frankfurt/Main, and at the Cooper Union School of Art & Parsons School of Design, New York. She lives and works in Berlin. Raum was awarded the first prize in the competition to design the entrance area of the W. Michael Blumenthal Academy at the Jewish Museum Berlin in 2023 and the Villa Romana Prize in 2015. She was artist-in-residence at Villa Massimo Rome / Casa Baldi in 2021. Her performances and video works were recently presented at Villa Romana, Florence; MoMA, New York; The Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, MA; House of World Cultures (HKW), Berlin; Halle für Kunst und Medien, Graz; ZKM, Karlsruhe; Salt, Istanbul; ifa Gallery Berlin, among others. Raum published extensively, most recently: Otti Berger: Weaving for Modernist Architecture (Hatje Cantz, spring 2024), edited for Bauhaus-Archiv / Museum für Gestaltung, Bauhaus Space (ifa Gallery, 2017), eser (Archive Books, 2015).