Fergus McCaffrey is pleased to present a solo exhibition of works on paper and photography by innovative Austrian artist Birgit Jürgenssen (1949–2003), on view at the gallery’s Tokyo location beginning September 28, 2018. Birgit Jürgenssen will highlight the artist’s concern for material and process, featuring nine drawings and three rarely exhibited multimedia collages created during the seventies, as well as a selection of photographs and photo-based collages from the late eighties and early nineties. Together, these works demonstrate Jürgenssen’s decades-long exploration of representation, irony, and originality, celebrating the ways in which her inventive drawing and photographic practices informed each other.
Jürgenssen applied her academic training in drawing and graphics to engage contemporary issues, including feminism, psychoanalytic theory, and Structuralism. After graduating from the University of Applied Arts, Vienna in 1971, she found herself out of place in the Viennese art world, which was dominated by the Viennese Actionists’ violent, transgressive masculinity and the socially conservative Austrian bourgeoisie. Jürgenssen immersed herself in a private studio practice, developing an extraordinarily rich and prolific oeuvre of drawing, performance, photography, and sculpture.
