AJ notes from Hatje Cantz book: Framed at Estate Unique Signed, dated € 16,000 Studio Body I Am, 2013, Press Release: Birgit Jürgenssen’s self portraits (1978-79) are also ritualistic, in...
Framed at Estate Unique Signed, dated € 16,000 Studio
Body I Am, 2013, Press Release:
Birgit Jürgenssen’s self portraits (1978-79) are also ritualistic, in this case through the artist painting her skin, then tying animal skulls to her forehead or looming from behind a death-mask cast from her own face and painted with skeletal features. In this group Jürgenssen dwelt not only on the notion of the ‘beautiful corpse’ but the idea in Austrian culture of ‘Frau Welt’, the personification of the idea of ‘woman’, whom patriarchal folklore viewed as being both fearful of death and a source of fatal disease. As alluring self-fetishised ‘woman’, Jürgenssen is both critiquing and counter-examining these destructive stereotypes, and those of occidental pictorial traditions.