Renate Bertlmann: Fragile Obsessions

As a key figure of the feminist avant-garde in Austria and a pioneer in the field of international performance art, Renate Bertlmann has been developing a distinctive body of work since the 1970s. For more than five decades, the Austrian artist, born in Vienna in 1943, has been obsessively working on her cosmos, which includes photographs and drawings, assemblages, sculptures, installations, performances, films, and videos. Bertlmann gained international attention later in life and was initially mostly known in a feminist context until her work was featured in a pivotal survey show at SAMMLUNG VERBUND’s Vertical Gallery in Vienna in 2016. Her breakthrough moment manifested when she became the first female artist to represent Austria alone in the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019. In the year of her eightieth birthday, the Belvedere Museum is presenting the most comprehensive retrospective to date.

With an idiosyncratic and fascinating choice of motifs, media, and materials, Bertlmann developed a distinct artistic vocabulary even in her early work: forms and motifs such as the phallus, the vulva, and the breast; bride and groom; the wheelchair; the pacifier, and the scalpel remain constants in her examination of male dominance and petty bourgeois morality to this day. Latex castings, plexiglass in fluorescent colors, and scalpels are paired with pacifiers, condoms, and dildos. Conceptual black-and-white photographs are juxtaposed with glittering and tinseled works, performances, and large-scale installations. The artist draws from conceptual and pop-cultural aesthetics, appropriates pornography and kitsch from an altered perspective, and references literature, film, medicine, religion, and spirituality.

In the late 1970s, Bertlmann established “amo ergo sum” (I love, therefore I am) as the programmatic leitmotif for her artistic endeavors. In the sense of a feminist appropriation—a central strategy of the artist—she rejects the famous dictum of philosopher René Descartes, “cogito ergo sum” (I think, therefore I am) in favor of prioritizing emotion and sensory perception. Bertlmann emphasizes a holistic approach to being, incorporating the body, mind, and soul instead of a logocentric perspective. She also groups her entire body of work into three interwoven categories: pornography, irony, and utopia, reflecting her radical opposition to patriarchal values yet also her passion for sensual experimentation. Renate Bertlmann’s radical, ironically provocative works subvert social attributions and stereotypes of gender, femininity, and masculinity, thus addressing the female body as a battlefield and assessing the ambivalences of pleasure and pain, desire and discipline, tenderness and vulnerability, which are also expressed in the exhibition’s title, Fragile Obsessions.

The retrospective at Belvedere 21 includes approximately two hundred exhibits that span from the late 1960s to the most recent artistic production, in a chronological presentation that enables the viewer to discern lines of progression, continuities, and ruptures. On view are iconic works such as Zärtliche Pantomime (1976), Waschtag (1976/2023), Wurfmesserbraut (1978), and Rosemaries Baby (1983), as well as numerous works presented for the first time such as Wann werden die Theologen endlich etwas von Zärtlichkeit erzählen (1979), Verlust der Mitte (1980), Regret (1999), and, the most recent work from the enfant terrible series, Drag Queen (2023). The exhibition is arranged into four thematic areas that trace the chronological evolution of the artist’s work: Experiments in Defiant Female Resilience explores her early work, central motifs, and strategies that are later expanded upon in Anger and Tenderness and include photographic self-stagings as well as performances in front of an audience. Vulnerability and Idiosyncrasy brings together explorations of existential questions, feminism, and spirituality, while Kitsch as a Pleasurable Breach of Taboos follows Bertlmann’s subversive-ironic approach to the present day. The exhibition architecture has been specially designed for this extensive collection of works by studio-itzo (Martina Schiller and Rainer Stadlbauer).

Curated by Luisa Ziaja.
Assistant Curator: Andrea Kopranovic

Catalogue
Renate Bertlmann: Fragile Obsessionen / Fragile Obsessions
Editors: Stella Rollig, Luisa Ziaja
Authors: Patricia Allmer, Renate Bertlmann, Ashton Cooper, Andrea Kopranovic, Marija Nujic, Rebekka Reuter, Stella Rollig, Gabriele Schor, Felicitas Thun-Hohenstein, Luisa Ziaja
Graphic design: Ivonne Stark
Verlag Buchhandlung Walther & Franz König, Cologne
Approx. 320 pages, 230 plates
Format: 22.5 × 31.5 cm, hardcover
German and English in one volume
ISBN 978-3-7533-0558-5
Sale price: 34 EUR
Published mid-November 2023

Press contact: Irene Jäger / presse [​at​] belvedere.at / T +43 1 79 557-185

View press materials here.