Feminist art does not reach the heart sometimes, if the political Want on the Form, so too much politics and too little art. Not so in the case of the Austrian artist Birgit Jürgenssen: Hardly a form of conscious wanderer between the worlds, as Jürgenssen can think of, your ideas are always sensual, appealing figure in the appropriate Medium, in drawings and sculptures, experimental objects, Videos, and especially photographs, consistently so in the Form of art, never as a mere Agit-Prop.

Stefan Trinks

editor in the features section.

F. A. Z.

Under the title “I am” shows the Kunsthalle Tübingen is now, with around two hundred works, the first German retrospective of 2003, only 54 years of the late artist, which includes all stages of your work. Peter Weibel, once an artist himself, saw in Jürgenssen to law, the Missing Link between two of the flagship avant-garde inside of the seventies, Valie Export and Maria Lassnig. With the bitter-sweet object “housewife-kitchen apron”, the massive Ballast of the stomach hung on the hearth, in the tube in addition to a Roast, vulgo child, was pushed, created Jürgenssen in 1975, an icon of the critical art of the seventies.

The Strangers in their Own

In contrast to many others, she is not content with the charge of traditional role models, because photographs with this slung over his shoulder the life burden you once-frontal self-confident with by pressing the backbone, right next to it, but also in profile in the Tradition of mug shots photos, in which she reveals itself as the victim and the perpetrator at the same time. As always, in her work, she is not ready for a clear political statement on the complexity of adversaries of human characters. If you are photographed, for example, in the “Nest” of 1979, with a gender concrete bird’s nest between the legs, she has “the balls” to put two of these in the hatchery. To the often enough, unpleasant track to the Strangers in their Own search, from the Transformation out of the peel, is the trademark of an artist that fits your style to each question.

as well As her colleague, Maria Lassnig couldn’t live jürgenssen from the art alone, but had to accept teaching assignments. That Arnulf Rainer also commissioned the creation of a separate class for photography at the art University, a course that did not previously exist, speaks for the unconditional trust he had in you. What made overpaintings, Rainer in his Face, is capable of Jürgenssen in their predominantly face and body-focusing photographs to convey: A sharp look in often deliberately blurred, soft-drawn facial landscapes, made by fetishes, masks, or animal parts, such as a Fox fur over the eyes in”, Even with the Fur” from 1974 as the conventional image of an individual useless in their hybrid occur in existence, but all the more stronger.

Jürgenssens photographic self-image with a Fox-like pursed lips, in the upper half of the face and especially the eyes are creepy covers from the fur of a dead Fox, is a speaking example for your image of research in terms of “women in society”. You continued in your images as in your teaching of art historical traditions such as surrealism, the art direction of the story, which was influenced by the artists in larger number.

Recognizable of the nerve is borrowed from tickling irritation of the feel of an animal fur on the face of Meret Oppenheim, in the case of the “fur Cup”, some of the viewer Herpes in the perception of the need to put the lips to a fur – coated drinking vessels, and so Jürgenssen sends without fear of this great master of surrealism, a dedicated trigger of your “Even with Fur”. As much of the photo is to transform a self-conscious reformulation of a nice Renaissance portraits of Women with fur, as well as the metamorphoses of Ovid, the number of women in the natural, you are come allegedly.