‘Cinzia Ruggeri and Birgit Jürgenssen: Late Masters’
Giovanna Manzotti, ArtReview
March 2025
Both artists, posthumously united in a group show at ICA Milano, sought to identify and escape the burden of culturally instituted gender roles.
There are so many affinities between the creative universes of Cinzia Ruggeri and Birgit Jürgenssen that, looking at this juxtaposition of their practices by artist Maurizio Cattelan and curator Marta Papini, it’s surprising that they apparently never met. Born seven years apart – artist/designer Ruggeri (1942–2019) in Milan, artist/educator/curator Jürgenssen (1949–2003) in Vienna – they moved freely between disciplines, making themselves – in the title’s poetic argot – ‘bridges’. Ruggeri’s eclectic Fluxus-influenced oeuvre merged fashion, design, art, music, architecture and performance; Jürgenssen moved between photography, drawing, painting, sculpture and clothing, infusing everything with an ironic tone harkening back to Dadaism and Surrealism (Meret Oppenheim seems to have been a signal influence). As the exhibition text points out, both artists used their diverse languages to investigate, among other things, the female body, its transformation, clothing as an expression of identity and ways to escape the burden of culturally instituted gender roles. […]