by Catrin Lorch
(Contribution to Judith Raum's publication Hedwig Roth, published by Zilberman Gallery Berlin, 2025)
A scene from the Japanese family series “Asura”. The take shows the entrance to “Tsunako’s Ikebana School”. Tsunako’s students, dressed in simple kimonos, take off their shoes before entering the school. Inside, on the tables, we see tall wooden vases for bamboo. Next to them are branches, flower stems, leaves. Tsunako goes from one student to the next, enunciating slowly and clearly: “In selecting which leaves to cut off … Distribute and arrange them … everything should appear natural … .” The teacher stops short in front of a bouquet and inspects it, almost amazed. “That could work with the chrysanthemums. That’s good. Try something bold.“
That is funny. Is it the seriousness with which Tsunako interprets the flower arrangements? The possibility, echoing in her challenge to try “something bold”, that from the domestic work on flowers and stems, following precise rules, a form of subversion could unexpectedly arise? “Bold” is no radical concept – that, too, fits the scene. But we hear an echo of more than just a small rebellion. A few minutes and a few takes before this scene, we saw how Tsunako, otherwise so restrained, threw her glass of red wine in anger against a window, traditionally overlain with paper. The dripping red spots and stains, was that “bold”?
Art history is a narrative of conflicts. Since the Renaissance, artists have wrangled for primacy – Michelangelo and Leonardo, giants and rivals. Sculpture or painting, architecture or design? Wherever art is negotiated, it is about recognition, visibility, competition. About hierarchies in the canon – among artists, among disciplines. And there is likewise an order of the divisions of creative work: fine art – arts and crafts – craft. And one step lower: Hausfleiß[1] [done within the household exclusively for and by its members).
The latter is at home where “Home” hangs on the door. That is, not in a studio or workshop, where one finds inspiration, grand commissions, or at least fixed working hours. Hausfleiß? That just happens. There, where one produces things that are needed just then in the household. Or that make life there warmer, more beautiful, softer, more colorful: baby blankets, puppet theatres, place cards for the table, stuffed animals, socks, birthday garlands, photo albums, Easter bouquets. Where someone takes up a task on her own initiative, bringing taste and skill to bear, the history of art is scarcely interested. Dilettantism belongs to its definition: domestic industry is at best traditional, folkloresque.
And from just such a home comes this delicate, rounded, relaxed profile. The woman we see on this small sheet of paper has a short nose and a straight forehead, her hair seems to be tied behind her neck in a low bun. The model for the template, with which Judith Raum in Untitled (Woman at the Window), 2025, transferred this profile in completely altered proportions onto lengths of fabric, is a cut-paper silhouette by Hedwig Bock, née Roth[2]. She is the artist’s grandmother. The thick vines and archaic crow, as well, which Judith Raum shows in her exhibition Hedwig Roth, are derived from cut-paper silhouettes from another era.
Hedwig Bock, called Hedi, grew up at the beginning of the last century in Schauenstein, a small city in Germany’s Oberfranken, near the border with Thuringia. After her marriage in 1927, she moved to Ebersdorf in the rural district of Kronach, not far from the places of her childhood. Her husband, Heinrich Bock, was engaged as Protestant pastor there. His entry into Hedi’s life lends the work one of its most playful moments: a silhouette in which we see Hedi and Heinrich sitting together on a deeply bowed willow bough. Gently swinging, framed by branches and leaves, the couple appear to be looking out beyond the picture – perhaps into their future.
Hedwig Bock was to have twelve children and many grandchildren – a large family that she worked at, and which in turn shaped her own oeuvre: Heiner, Ursula, Eberhard, Veronika, Friederike, Matthias, Jörg, Cornelia, Maximilian…. Their round little heads, chubby hands, dresses with aprons, snub noses, clumsy steps – all this is documented in her cut-paper silhouettes. Children run through the grass or roam through nature; three small silhouettes stand together under a tree and catch at falling leaves. A whole troupe, disguised in hats and costumes, march by in parade as black shadows. One of the many profiles is of Judith, the granddaughter.
Judith Raum has reunited this body of work, which was preserved here and there by her family, with the precision appropriate to organizing, reviewing, and evaluating a catalogue of works. But how does one deal with such a thick stack of legacy? And does one even have the right to submit so private a discipline to critical assessment? The paper cutting, the art of the silhouette, has been associated, from the beginning, with a very personal meaning – it is manageable, inexpensive, frugal.
In times in which one still believed one could judge a person’s character from the form of his skull, chin, forehead, and symmetry, the silhouette was in fact a tool of identification. Study and Rorschach inkblot in one, an image of friendship, something for the album or a small frame: a rapid, clever, sometimes flattering, sometimes caricatured study of the other, to be mutually exchanged and admired (long before the invention of photography, there was obviously demand for a medium less time-consuming than a painted portrait). Goethe’s Werther tacks a silhouette of his beloved Lotte on the wall. For it is evident that feelings are often involved, when someone reaches for the scissors and paper cutting paper – and because the process always produces two paper cuts, the negative and the positive form, the gift often links two owners.
While there was surely little time for hours-long mixing of paints and long portrait sittings in the manse of the Bock family, and moreover no room for easel, canvas, poisonous turpentine and oil paints, the small, pointed scissors will have lain at hand, just like the sewing box, card games, or knitting needles. The American anthropologist Judith K. Brown, in her text “A Note on the Division of Labor by Sex”, observed that women in pre-industrial communities performed certain work simply because it could be reconciled more easily with “the needs of child-rearing”[3] at home (@Darrell: exakte Quellenangabe für Fußnote wird nachgereicht): weaving, cooking, knitting, pottery.
And while the parsonage circumscribes the work of Hedwig Bock, her insight into her own children grows keen, her attention to their growth, their maturing. The lovingly gauged observation of the tilt of a tiny head, a shy pose, or an almost defiant audacity drives her artistic development. Composition, contrast, finesse in crafting, at times deliberate reduction. But this focus also appears to lead to the result that Hedwig Bock herself almost never appears in the picture. There are very few self-portraits, and those that exist are staged reservedly. Only one of them shows her as artist, with scissors, pencil, and paper in hand.
That now – a few decades later – one of her grandchildren is taking a closer look at her entire artistic output reverses the relationship: if for no other reason, then because the spontaneous and private is now being laid out chronologically and thematically, being compared, analyzed. How to deal with a life’s work, which possibly never before has been viewed holistically and sorted? For Hedwig Bock did not see herself as an artist who was concerned with the validity of her oeuvre – she was concerned with capturing the moment, fighting the erasures of time, nurturing memory. One imagines that the motif for the place cards or the birthday present was considered finished when it suited the occasion, with all possible craftsmanship. Even later, when Hedwig Bock discovered printing techniques, one imagines that she sketched, drafted, cut, printed – to make a gift. And that she very quickly handed out what her hands had crafted.
Judith Raum extended her study of the work over a period of several months – and gradually freed herself of loving sentimentality. The silhouettes she depicts in stark black-and-white contrast – of her grandparents, her mother, uncles and aunts, the outlines of church buildings, furniture, and dwellings – all these are there, on slim archival tables. And the tiny portrait of a child looking out through a window that would seem to be barred. Vines and petals, too, some colored in very bright and loud colors. It is the especially powerful stalks, the strong tendrils, that Judith Raum has sought out as patterns when cutting out over-sized templates for her works Untitled (Clematis / Centaurea / Galanthus), 2025.
The artist experimented for a long time with a technique that could pick up on these motifs, and appropriate them. In her studio, she produced broad and long lengths of fabric, which have the effect of rubbings, a clotted back and forth between bright and dark, flickering and wide-ranging. The private atmosphere is gone, as is the template-like simplicity. What is hanging on the wall no longer fits into the poetry album or the illustrated book of trolls. Larger, more opulent, almost presumptuous. The patterns used by her grandmother, which seemed to rhyme effortlessly, like verse and stanza – they falter, something seems to be stuck. As if Judith Raum had pepped up the patterns on the heavy fabric with thickly mixed paint.
At the entrance to the last room of the exhibition hangs a strange, small-format watercolor on paper. A Berlin water pump, knobby as a root, seems to be out and about all by itself, its handles outstretched awkwardly like little arms. An enormous child jumps in the air from one street-lamp to another, which has an almost wild effect, like an abrupt escape in the midst of this quiet, forlorn horror scene. The small picture remains ambiguous and almost disturbing. Although it is not glaring, it stands out in the context of paper-cut silhouettes, lengths of fabric, and printing blocks.
Behind it, slides click through the carousel – a stream of photographs, which follows Judith Raum, as she leafs through an early photo album of the Bock family. The sequence of images has, on the one hand, the effect of a chronicle. On the other, a subtext pops up time and again in the heavy narration, sudden and unexpected: Judith Raum focusses here on the grimaces of the children, who appear at the edge of a table. Or on the reflection in the background of the bedroom. A dwarf king with a paper crown, a child’s broad smile.
The second projection takes this mood as a starting point – and Judith Raum translates it in the fashion of a shadow play into her own playful manipulation of black and white. The little charades, the costumings and awkward moments that Hedwig Bock observed, meld here into a stream of images, in which the uninhibited, the gloomy, the hob-goblins of childhood take shape. Here, the narrative seems to falter, to find its own rhythm in contrast to the idylls, to the soft, round, velvety silhouettes. Judith Raum, who has observed the work of her grandmother so painstakingly and precisely, with these images breaks free of any hint of examination and retrospection. Here, her artistic research comes to an end – among other reasons because the medium – the clear, razor-sharp delineations of these black-and-white photographs – rejects any form of appropriation and citation as a barren, idiosyncratic charade.
The 13th Berlin Biennale begins its tour with floral/flowers, the exhibition within an exhibition is devoted exclusively to pictures of flowers. What these works have in common, as the catalogue states, is that the artists have produced them “as a side practice”. The curators go on to explain that “many of these floral works were created in exile or in hiding. They bear the memory of trauma - of landscapes marked by displacement and the historical extraction of vital forces. The flower studies have an element of quietness or apparent passivity. An uncontroversial activity, the act of drawing, painting, or photographing flowers nevertheless foregrounds persistence - the urge to keep working ….”[4] (exakte Quelle wird nachgereicht)
Judith Raum is an artist. She chooses where she works – in the studio, in her kitchen, or while travelling. And she does not have to be useful, warm, or comfortable. Likewise, the museum for contemporary art is no longer about gatekeeping, but rather inclusion. When Judith Raum decides to expand her “artistic research” to the financing of the Turkish railway network by German banks, she presents her research in the form of a lecture performance. Or she shows a video. Or what remains to be exhibited after a road trip through the USA are the images with which she documented the work of Bauhaus artist Otti Berger, together with a photographer and a hand weaver. She is free to work with the brush, with the word processor, or with a recording device. That Judith Raum in fact discovers motifs for her work, that does not just happen all by itself.
The flowers that Hedwig Bock once cut out with scissors or a utility knife have grown big. They sprawl over the long ribbons of fabric, they occupy the exhibition space. In contrast to the practice of Ikebana – where one frames the empty space with tender boughs – these tendrils seem to push their way to the front, they are “there” with latent power. If one squints one’s eyes a little, however, one can also see in the layer of color lying lightly on the fabric a network of curly lines recalling a map, which looks as though it would suggest a soft, but willfully formed route of escape.
[1] The literal translation of Hausfleiß would be domestic industriousness. Alois Riegl…..folk art has not been included among the perceived »universal« forms of
painting, sculpture, and architecture
[2] Hedwig Roth took the name of her husband, Heinrich Bock, when she married, and henceforth signed her work as Hedwig Bock or HB. A few exceptions exist, in which she chose the form Hedwig Bock-Roth for her signature. Judith Raum, for the title of her exhibition at Zilberman / Berlin, consciously chose her grandmother’s maiden name.
[3] Judith K. Brown: “A Note on the Division of Labor by Sex”, in: American Anthropologist, Vol. 52, Issue 5, 1970, pp. 1073-1078.
[4] (XXX Autorin), Passing the Fugitive on, Catalogue for the 13th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, Berlin, 2025, p. 29.