Jürgenssen, who Peter Weibel once described as the „missing link“ in the history of feminist art, did not live to see the international recognition of her pioneering, emancipatory work, that began with her posthumous retrospective in Vienna in 2010/11.[1]

In the early 1970s, in a climate of the male-dominated public life and art world, Birgit Jürgenssen began to formulate a subtle, often self-deprecating critique of social dogmas and cultural constructions of femininity, using the means of masking and transformation.

The playful and subversive appropriation of a multitude of masks and poses in circulation enables Jürgenssen to cross identity boundaries pleasurably – between the sexes, between human and animal, human and object, nature and culture, between the organic and the artificial.

Birgit Jürgenssen‘s unflinching work on these transitions therefore also meant eluding a homogeneous, recognisable „signature style“, media boundaries or conventional art-historical classifications – a quality that after all, was only able to be appreciated posthumously.

Through strategies of self-irony, parody, subversion and linguistic reversal of meaning, Birgit Jürgenssen exposed the conventional forms of representation of the feminine, leaving behind any „orthodox“ feminism.

At the centre of her artistic exploration was her own body, which she used as a site of artistic intervention and at the same time exposed as a projection surface for social and cultural codes. Unlike her peers such as Yoko Ono, Marina Abramović or Valie Export, however, Birgit Jürgenssen never staged provocative public performances, for which she described herself as too „shy“, but rather focussed on her work in a more poetic and intimate way.

The extent to which Jürgenssen used the surface of the body as a place of permeability and experimentation with the „other“ is revealed by series of works such as the Body Projections, 1987/88, photographically fixed projections of pictorial and written signs on naked skin, in which the artist semantically and medially interweaves the body and pictorial surface.

For her series of Rankings, 1999, Jürgenssen drew on photographs of naked women wrestling with each other, which were taken during a project at the Academy of Fine Arts in Arnulf Rainer‘s master class, where she taught as an assistant for over two decades.

In her search for an adequate media treatment, she chose liquid bath essences that not only attacked the image carrier, but whose formlessness also seems to be transferred to the bodies, which dissolve into the fluid space.

In Jürgenssen‘s surreal rayograms of natural history, man and nature are inextricably intertwined. They testify to a heightened sensibility, a relationship to the world that questions allegedly separate spheres, who seek out connections and overcomes the boundaries between the self and the other, permeated by a deep and extremely topical ecological awareness.

Text by Heike Eipeldauer

[1] Gabriele Schor and Heike Eipeldauer, Birgit Jürgenssen, Exhib.-Cat. Bank Austria Kunstforum and Sammlung Verbund, Munich 2010. Birgit Jürgenssen‘s works can now be found in important international collections such as MoMA, New York, Tate Modern, London, Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI, Paris etc. Between 2018 and 2020, the exhibition Birgit Jürgenssen, initiated by the Estate Birgit Jürgenssen, Vienna, toured Birgit Jürgenssen. I am (2018-20) toured to the Kunsthalle Tübingen, GAMeC – Galleria d‘Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Bergamo, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk and Weserburg Museum für Moderne Kunst Bremen.