Birgit Jürgenssen
| Birgit Jürgenssen | |
|---|---|
Birgit Jürgenssen
|
|
| Born | 1949 Austria |
| Died | 2003 |
| Nationality | Austrian |
| Occupation | Photography, painting, graphic art, curator and teacher |
Birgit Jürgenssen (1949–2003) was an Austrian photographer, painter, graphic artist, curator and teacher who specialized in feminine body art with self-portraits and photo series, which have revealed a sequence of events related to the daily social life of a women in its various forms including an atmosphere of shocking fear and common prejudices. She was acclaimed as one of the "outstanding international representatives of the feminist avant-garde". She lived in Vienna. Apart from holding solo exhibitions of her photographic and other art works, she also taught at the University of Applied Arts Vienna and the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.
Jürgenssen was born in Vienna, Austria in 1949. Between 1968 and 1971 she studied at the University of Applied Arts, Vienna. From the late 1960s, she developed her diverse photographic art forms which revolved around the female body and its transformation.
Jürgenssen's oeuvre presents femininity forms created by photographs, which demarcate the external cultural codes within the frame work of the prevalent repressive and frequently restrictive nature of a women's life. In the corpus of her works, presented in association with Hubert Winter who managed her estate titled "Jürgenssen's estate", the pictures are a wide mosaic of "drawings, water colour paintings, photogrammes, screens, solar graphics and objects from various collections". In 1972, as a gender representation, she photographed her own body in four postures with the inscription "frau (woman)". In another self-portrait taken in 1976, and called "Ich möchte hier raus! (I want out of here!)", Jürgenssen is dressed in a "neat, white lace collar and brooch", and pressing her cheek and hands to a glass display case, which is interpreted to suggest "her entrapment in the repressive codes of beauty and domesticity that women have often been subject to".
Jürgenssen's photographic works, numbering 250, were exhibited in a retrospective held by the Sammlung Verbund and the Bank Austria Art Forum; 50 of these works are exclusively exhibited by the Sammlung Verbund, Vienna.
One of Jürgenssen's unique works is titled "10 Days – 100 Photos" published in 1980. This collection, which has 100 pictures taken over a period of 10 days, consists of self-portraits, with face excluded or camouflaged by fur, in Polaroids and photographs which have been set in an asymmetrically fashion with interjections of a few lines of narrative. On this picturization Jürgenssen said: "the identity of the woman has been made to disappear – all except for the fetishized object, which is the focus of male fantasy". In another work of 1974 titled "Amazon" she has photographed "mother and child" in a standing pose with hands held like "latter-day holy figures on a tall iron chair."
...
Wikipedia