Hedwig Roth, solo exhibition

Zilberman Berlin, May - July 2025

Hedwig Roth (1906–1989), the maiden name Raum uses for her first solo exhibition at Zilberman Berlin in reference to her grandmother, led a life as wife of a protestant pastor and mother of twelve children shaped by a profound faith and obligations towards her family and community. Starting in the 1920s, she also produced a remarkably independent oeuvre of silhouettes and linoleum prints, consisting primarily of figurative representations of plants and animals, as well as portraits of family members and friends. Particularly poignant is her figure of a child behind a window frame, which, on the one hand, suggests confinement, but on the other evokes a longing for faraway places and the child’s ambition to liberate herself from the circumstances in which she is caught. This image expresses an ambivalence that may be said to characterize Roth’s work. Judith Raum picks up on this possibility of shaping an independent perspective on the world in large-format tapestries, each filled by a hand holding a pair of glasses or scissors – tools used to shape or to criticize.

Judith Raum’s research-based practice is devoted, among other things, to reintegrating the work of marginalized female artists into art history. In her extensive work on the Bauhaus textile designer Otti Berger (1898–1944), most recently presented in the Bauhaus-Archiv / Museum für Gestaltung of Berlin and London’s Victoria & Albert Museum, she sheds light on Berger’s contribution to the architecture of Modernism. In Hedwig Roth, she takes the same approach, making the work of her grandmother accessible for the first time outside of her family circle. By virtue of her own artistic practice, Raum gets as close as possible to her material and to the social circumstances in which it arose. She thus opens up new ways of seeing it, and develops her own techniques in response to Hedwig Roth’s work with linoleum and scissors. These techniques render tangible a kind of transgenerational rubbing of elbows, as it were as an imprint. At the same time, Raum overtly places her grandmother’s work in dialogue with artists working in a professional context, such as the British textile designer Dorothy Larcher (1884–1952). Larcher, influenced by the Vorticist movement – the English variant of Futurism – operated, jointly with her partner Phyllis Barron, a fabric printing business in London. Larcher’s abstracted, adamantine plant forms are juxtaposed, in this exhibition, with Roth’s filigreed cut-outs of wildflowers, which consistently incorporate plant communities into their composition: botanical systems in which a diversity of forms co-exist, rather than support any one dominant species.

The exhibition reveals itself as a dense, multi-layered installation. Original works by Hedwig Roth are organized in groupings based on related motifs or ‘family resemblances’ and displayed on midnight-blue Plexiglas tables. The soft textural qualities of the paper, refined with very finely traced cuts, contrast with hard, transparent supports, whose curved steel legs re-appear as echoing forms in two sculptural works and span a tensely drawn narrative arc between memory, spatial gesture, and corporeality. One of these sculptures, in its form, recalls a free-standing mirror. In the photographs, which Hedwig Roth’s husband took of his young wife, mirrors are employed as an element of staging. These photographs raise questions relative to the ambivalent significance of the body and sexuality in the home of a Protestant pastor. A blue lady’s glove, with its fingers sewn together to resemble the webbed feet of a bird, is wittily perched on a narrow metal rod. Ravens and bats – creatures associated with twilight and darkness – re-appear in Hedwig Roth’s work, and Judith Raum introduces them into the exhibition’s span of themes as messengers and escorts of human beings. The second sculpture evokes the form of a bed: a metal frame, upholstered with material that picks up on a design by Dorothy Larcher. The motif suggests associations with human, animal, and vegetable forms, such as the fern leaf. On Larcher’s original pattern, we read the word “spine” – evoking the spinal column, the back, the skeleton.

In large-format textile prints and rubbings, Judith Raum borrows specific motifs from the linoleum prints and paper-cut silhouettes of her grandmother, such as the female figure at the window or images of wildflowers. Some of the black-and-white prints on semi-transparent lengths of fabric acquire, through color fields laid as an underlying base, an almost sculptural effect. Color accents on the surrounding walls lend vivid emphasis to the motifs on the swaths of fabric: plant, human, and animal silhouettes gradually float free from the underlying base, and make their way optically into the foreground, only to retreat behind other forms again when you look at them long enough: an artful play with visibility and layering.

The path through the exhibition leads finally to an installation with two slide projectors. We see, projected onto textile surfaces, details of photographs that show Hedwig Roth as fiancée or young mother in the 1920s and 1930s, surrounded by her first children and nature. Using a magnifying glass, Judith Raum has sought out details from scenes of daily life, in which childish freedom, parental love, and the adults’ efforts to achieve autonomy jostle with one another. The scenes in these photographs offer a stark contrast to an historical reality that is already suffused with the totalitarian ideology of National Socialism. In several staged sequences, the activities of designing and narrating – represented by scissors and raven – re-appear to suggest critical interaction with a past, which was shaped by two World Wars and fascist dictatorship in Europe.

Rebecca Solnit, an author important to Judith Raum, describes in her book Orwell’s Roses how Orwell’s passion for his rose garden manifests a strong statement: an insistence on beauty and a joy in life, precisely in dark times. For Solnit, this return to nature does not represent withdrawal, but rather an expansion of Orwell’s political engagement – an attempt to create spaces in which life, imagination, and resistance can flourish. In the work of Hedwig Roth, too, we see an ability to act, which expresses itself in small gestures, persistent attention, and care for others, and which points to the future. Judith Raum picks up on this way of acting, translating it into a personal artistic language, which, being full of political and aesthetic potential, leaves an unmistakable impact on the present.

Text by Lotte Laub, translated by Darrell Wilkins

In accompaniment to the exhibition, Zilberman will publish a catalogue with texts contributed by Catrin Lorch, Judith Raum, and Sumana Roy, as well as an introduction by Lotte Laub. Judith Raum will give a lecture performance during the exhibition run.

Thanks to Luka Naujoks for her contribution in the photography for the show.