Birgit Jürgenssen’s Challenge to Patriarchy
Steven Zultanski, frieze
July 2019
Birgit Jürgenssen’s drawings and photographs are simultaneously blunt and oneiric. Beginning her career in the 1970s in Vienna, and associated with other feminist artists from the city such as Maria Lassnig and Valie Export, Jürgenssen fought for the inclusion of art by women in galleries and institutions, and made work that explicitly critiqued calcified gender roles.
But despite this explicitness, her images are rife with a fantastic symbolism, inspired by surrealism, which both communicates her politics and evokes the inexplicable. ‘Ich Bin’ (I Am), an exhibition of more than 70 drawings, photographs, and sculptures at the Louisiana Museum, is careful to emphasize both elements of her practice: her stridency as well as her embrace of the uncanny. […]