Birgit Jürgenssen
in ‘Feministische Avantgarde aus der Sammlung Verbund’, Lentos Kunstmuseum Linz
24 September 2021 – 9 January 2022
Birgit Jürgenssen, Frau, 1972. Courtesy: Alison Jacques, London © Estate Birgit Juergenssen
The Lentos will put on display more than 250 works of art from the Viennese VERBUND COLLECTION to show how 82 female artists put question marks against the construction of the feminine in the 1970s.
For the first time in the history of art many female artists in Europe and the U.S. explicitly confronted the suppression of women. Often they used their own bodies to protest the social roles women were assigned. Artists directed their critique against women being limited to their roles as mothers, housewives and wives. Their themes included women’s sense of being locked in, female sexuality, the necessity to conform to stereotypes of beauty and the multiplicity of female identities. What is surprising is the extent to which similar formal strategies came into being, even though in many cases the artists in question were not aware of each other.