Birgit Jürgenssen: Rupture
DECEMBER: MUZEUM SUSCH, SWITZERLAND
12 DECEMBER 2026 – 30 MAY 2027
© Estate Birgit Jürgenssen / Bildrecht Vienna, 2026.
With its comprehensive posthumous retrospective of Birgit Jürgenssen (1949–2003), Muzeum Susch presents the Austrian avant-garde artist’s first exhibition in Switzerland, revealing a richly layered and visionary body of work spanning four decades.
Jürgenssen was among the outstanding artists who, beginning in the 1970s, challenged rigid stereotypes, dismantled cultural constructs, and responded with incisive intelligence to the social debates of their time. ‘Be very creative, refuse your role’ was one of her guiding principles. Though she died at the age of fifty-four, she left behind an astonishingly dense oeuvre that reveals an artist in a state of perpetual thought and creation.
Jürgenssen’s gift for transformation and her subversive sense of humour permeate works that probe questions of identity, masquerade, socially conditioned gender relations, and human intimacy. Her recurring metamorphoses and manifold transformations draw on the Surrealist fascination with shifting the boundary between human and animal, reflecting both her deep connection to nature and her persistent attempts to free herself from social constraints. This multifaceted oeuvre resists any straightforward classification within traditional artistic genres. Rather than cultivating a recognisable signature style, Jürgenssen insisted on the freedom to experiment beyond academic rules and established visual conventions, refusing to confine either herself or her art. Her singular practice encompasses an extraordinary range of drawings and experimental photographs, while painting, sculpture, and video also became essential media through which she gave form to her inexhaustible imagination.
The camera—her constant companion and, until the end of her life, her most important means of expression—enabled Jürgenssen’s inward and outward reflections on ‘the gaze and the invisible’, as she herself described it. Throughout her work, the female body—often her own—became both image and projection surface: fragmented, fetishised, and continually reimagined. The struggle to break free from rigid stereotypes found expression in her delicate drawings as well as in her provocative photographic series. Always positioned both in front of and behind the camera, Jürgenssen became at once observer and observed.
The artist referred to a remarkable group of works created in the late 1980s and early 1990s as her Stoffarbeiten (‘fabric works’)—a dreamlike cycle of visual invention. Photographs, solarisations, and multiple exposures were assembled into cinematic sequences and veiled in gauze, forming seductive compendia that concealed their own secrets. As so often in Jürgenssen’s work, they both diverted and challenged the act of seeing itself. These complex photographic works reveal her deep engagement with Constructivism and Formalism, as well as with Surrealist iconography and experimental practice. At once unpredictable and profoundly informed, Jürgenssen moved through her time with an apparent elegance that belied the radical force of an oeuvre whose urgency remains strikingly contemporary.
The retrospective brings together around 150 works, including many rarely or never before exhibited. Rather than following a strictly chronological narrative, the exhibition unfolds across twelve interconnected galleries organised thematically, allowing Jürgenssen’s ‘wild thinking’, as she called it, and her ‘art from the in-between realm’ to emerge through a dynamic interplay of ideas and motifs, revealing the richness and heterogeneity of her practice.