# ICONS

Judith Zillich’s exhibition at galeriekrems combines aspects of traditional icon painting with her personal perspective. During a fellowship in Lviv, Ukraine, she studied the early Christian symbolism behind the schematic representations of icons. She also learned traditional painting techniques. Her approach emphasizes the precision and symbolism of icon painting, in which faces are constructed using geometric templates and the principles of the golden ratio. At the same time, she reinterprets these established rules for herself. Using the centuries-old technique of egg tempera painting, she captures on paper a contemporary interpretation of the image of women and the mother-child relationship.

Her style combines strict guidelines with subtle deviations that reveal emotional and interpersonal nuances. She plays with traditional symbols to create new forms of expression that both respect the original form and allow for a contemporary interpretation. The artist breaks down the schematic form of traditionally painted figures into their individual symbols, thus creating her own formal language of lines and surfaces. For instance, the repeated symbol for the child’s hand forms a “halo” around the mother’s head.

Judith Zillich was born in 1969 in Graz, Austria. She studied philosophy at the University of Vienna from 1992 to 1995 and painting at the University of Applied Arts Vienna and the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris from 1994 to 2000. She has received numerous awards for her work, including the Theodor Körner Prize (2000) and several scholarships abroad, most recently to Albania in 2023. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Kulturzentrum bei den Minoriten (Graz, 2021) and the Egon Schiele Art Centrum (2020/21).