Entering the artistic universe of a feminist avant-garde artist

Birgit Jürgenssen
28 June – 3 August 2024
Alison Jacques Gallery, London, UK

I popped into Alison Jacques two weeks ago and saw this art exhibition of Birgit Jürgenssen, which I believe is totally worth a visit before it closes on 3 August. You have to go to the lower level of the gallery to enter the individual universe of this artist.

Birgit Jürgenssen (1949–2003) was an Austrian-born artist who created a wide variety of work—paintings, photographs, performances, sculptures, collages, drawings, and clothing, among other forms and media—before she died in 2003 at the early age of fifty-four. Jürgenssen, who was also a curator and lecturer at the University of Applied Arts and the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, specialized in feminine body art with self-portraits and photo series and was acclaimed as one of the “outstanding international representatives of the feminist avant-garde.”

“My works are a jigsaw puzzle about the causes of erotic manipulation and their relationship to self-confidence. A game of self and the other, about subject and object, private and public. It is also the confrontation of one reality with another vision of the same reality.”
– Birgit Jürgenssen, 1992

Her work looks into women’s inner lives, influenced by outside power structures. A lot of Jürgenssen’s pieces focus on the domestic life of a mythical figure, the ‘hausfrau’: an ideal bourgeois Austrian housewife. The exhibition showcases Jürgenssen’s diverse yet consistent critique of the existing hierarchies, especially the male-dominated Viennese Actionism movement. Throughout the show, you’ll see a unique system of strange symbols and metaphors; hair, leaves, shoes, screens, masks, and mirrors are used to explore female identity and the art of image-making.

As Jürgenssen says: “The identity of the woman has been made to disappear—all except for the fetishized object, which is the focus of male fantasy.”

In the exhibition, the female body appears—not just as a physical presence, but as a medium for experience—offering, as Jürgenssen described, “another vision of the same reality.”

I was mesmerized by the body of work presented in this show, but in particular, I loved the ‘Mattress Shoes’ (1973), which you can appreciate in one of the pictures below, the ‘Head Sandal’ (1976), also on display below with The art blackberry in the background, and the various drawings presented here, including the colorful shoe (commonly used as a fetish) designs that bring you into the individual universe of the artist.

In 2022, her work was exhibited at Milk of Dreams, the 59th Venice Biennale, curated by Cecilia Alemani and has been included in multiple art exhibitions after her death. However, I believe that she was truly one of the first feminist artist who pushed boundaries and challenged existing ideas about the role of women in society, and hasn’t yet been given the place she deserves in the history of art.