Birgit Jürgenssen (1949-2003) was among Austria’s avant-garde in the 1970s. Alluding to the ponderous legacy of Surrealism, she unobtrusively developed an independent Œuvre that included not only a vast number of drawings, but also sculptures, experimental objects, videos and, above all, photographs.
Responding perceptively and critically to an increasingly industrialized and thus ‘demystified’ environment she gave life to surreal hybrid creatures, in which the animal—seen as "the other"—is anchored, grafted, inside the human being, confusing the boundaries between codified identities, in favor of a fluid relationship system.
Her drawings, collages and photomontages are characterized by a vigorous fantasy in the face of nature and testify to an integral awareness that we exist in an invisible interaction with the world around us.
The wide-ranging Œuvre of Birgit Jürgenssen is not only a testimony reflecting the zeitgeist of a period from the 1970s on. Even today, when we are experiencing an increasing levelling of everyday perception due to digitization, her body-related approach gains a whole new and contemporary topicality.
Jojo Gronostay (b. 1987 in Hamburg, lives and works in Vienna) is a German artist with Ghanaian roots. His practice engages systems that interrogate relationships between Europe and Africa, exploring concepts of value and economy, as well as spiritual, human and material exchange, as they perform in different social contexts.
Having a background in the fashion industry one of his primary media is fashion (see his label DWMC—Dead White Mens Clothes, founded in 2017). Jojo Gronostay’s work unfolds in a logic of complicity—using the styles and commodities of a globalized consumer society, while at the same time trying to navigate in late capitalism’s wake and questioning the issue of value—not only economically, but also in terms of identity, colonialism, and ecology.