Max Raab

Born in newly reunified Berlin in ’89, spent most of his childhood drawing on the walls of Kunsthaus Tacheles while his mother tended bar, wrote Marxist poetry, and had love affairs with bouncers and sculptors who formed his early ideas about bouncing and art. Enrolled at the Akademie der Künste at her urging, but walked out of the first lecture and never went back. Between shifts as a bouncer at legendary Bar 25, made a name for himself carving chunks of the Berlin Wall into giant animal crackers and hosting Shreiereien, a series of performance pieces eventually shut down by noise complaints from the neighbors. Co-founder, with Kirill, of Warum Denn?, a sporadic samizdat newspaper that cataloged Berlin’s burgeoning arts scene. Recently moved to New York on a grant from the Kunstfonds Foundation and began writing reviews to pad his visa application.