tut ravia

Tut Ravia (b.2000) was born in Jerusalem to an Orthodox Jewish family and is the fifth out of seven children.

Her father was secular from an ultra-Orthodox family and her mother was completely secular. Together they created a religious home.

The existing dissonance in Tut’s persona begins in her childhood. The house she grew up in was relatively permissive in the face of the conservative religious environment.

Throughout her childhood, Tut was exposed to the secular world. In her home, there were erotic novels that she read, as well as access to the internet which is not a common thing in the orthodox world.

The content she was exposed to brought up questions she could not get an answer to from her family members or others around her.

As a child, Tut used to visit her grandmother, who was an art teacher at a center for the elderly with special needs. As a result, Tut discovered her love for painting, which she saw as a refuge and provided her the answers she couldn’t get from her surroundings.

As a teenage girl, Tut studied in a semi-religious high school where she felt out of place, like she didn’t belong. During this period, she began to travel to Tel Aviv where she found her place among people her age with whom she explored the liberal culture that the metropolitan city had to offer, including queer culture, feminism, night life, etc’.

Simultaneously, Tut began working for a religious local landscape painter who sold them for a living in a market in Jerusalem. Throughout working with him she learned different techniques which she uses to this day.

Today, Tut is a multidisciplinary autodidactic artist who lives and works in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. She works in mediums such as painting and sculpture.

Tut Ravia is a figurative artist who draws attention to gender and sexual politics. Her work gives her the answers she sought as a young girl and represents the freedom she always chased. In the contemporary secular society which ostensibly allows for sexual freedom, Tut fights the constant attempts of authoritarian regimes to curb female sexuality.

Tut tries to evoke the feelings she feels while painting in the viewer’s eyes, whether it is feelings of disgust and rejection or feelings of satisfaction that reveal a person's most hidden appetite. Tut uses short, delicate brush strokes to build the painting and soften the image. She paints with oil, either on paper, canvas or glass and her palette changes according to the feeling she wants to evoke. Tut uses pornographic elements in her works not to represent an ideology of objectification and submission that is considered anti-progressive, but to oppose these points of view. Tut creates boundless art that describes contemporary existential situations or questions.

Her works take the viewer on a visual journey across fluidity in gender and sexuality, and visualize the taboos of sexuality. Tut conveys concepts that are beyond the promotion of sexual gratification by providing spiritual depth in her works.

She strives to continue exploring these concepts to an unknown extent.

Works