Erect bridges and not walls, form connections and not isolating schematisms. This is the diktat that guides the production of Birgit Jürgenssen and Cinzia Ruggeri, two artists who have never met but who are both captivated by the same subversive and transversal potential of the arts – from design to photography, from painting to sculpture. In continuity with their poetics of connections, ICA Milano presents an exhibition, curated by Maurizio Cattelan and Marta Papini, based on an unprecedented game of cross-references between the two creative artists.

Birgit Jürgenssen e Cinzia Ruggeri, “Lonely Are All Bridges”, installation view, curated by Maurizio Cattelan and Marta Papini, Fondazione ICA Milano, Milano. Ph. Andrea Rossetti
Defying all categorising constraints, the exhibition highlights the unconventional nature of the protagonists. In fact, they exploit the multifaceted nature of artistic techniques to create works characterised by a strong (self-)irony, triggering a playful critique of the image of women in modern society. Although attracted by continuous experimentation, the artists fall back on their fascination with a specific object: the accessory. It is precisely from the typical female accessories that the material and conceptual universe of Jürgenssen and Ruggeri unfolds. They bring out the performative aspect of ornaments, i.e. the power to contribute to the definition of the subject wearing them. The performative power of adornment, then, implies in turn the tra(n)sformation of the self, a crucial theoretical node for the cultural temperament of the 1970s-80s proliferating feminist philosophy, as well as the two artists’ debut years.

Birgit Jürgenssen e Cinzia Ruggeri, “Lonely Are All Bridges”, installation view, curated by Maurizio Cattelan and Marta Papini, Fondazione ICA Milano, Milano. Ph. Andrea Rossetti
By wearing a certain clothing accessory – be it a handbag, a pair of high heels or gloves – one’s use of it retroacts on one’s way of conceiving oneself, as Jürgenssen demonstrates by transforming the thumb of a hand into the heel of a shoe in the photograph Untitled. Improvisation (1976). Thus the performative accessory becomes part of a deeper anthropological investigation that sees humanity – as well as the concepts of woman or beauty – as an end and not as a starting point. The shoe-hand of Jürgenssian imagery, then, acquires even more expressive force when it enters into dialogue with a host of shoes designed or chosen by Ruggeri (60 pairs of shoes, 1981-87) which, arranged along the wall adjacent to Improvisation, seem to condense the entire spectrum of human personalities. This play of mirrors between the works of the two creatives around the same object of fascination orients the viewer in a visit to an exhibition that, image after image, reveals itself to be a questioning movement on the status of gender and identity. The identity that emerges, however, is never entirely clear, but always altered by a changing play of light and shadow, generated by social transformations, personal stances or simple, irreducible circumstances.

Birgit Jürgenssen e Cinzia Ruggeri, “Lonely Are All Bridges”, installation view, curated by Maurizio Cattelan and Marta Papini, Fondazione ICA Milano, Milano. Ph. Andrea Rossetti
Shadows. This is another theme that provokes the artists’ gaze and colours it with an uncanny tone. Ruggeri works on the theme by re-proposing it in a postmodern key, Jürgenssen reinterprets it in the light of a more surrealist sensibility. It is thus that the rooms of ICA are filled with a synaesthetic ‘visual echo’, produced by the echoing of an artefact by Ruggeri in one by Jürgenssen and vice versa, whose poetics end up illuminating each other and being at the same time each other’s shadows. A case in point of this metanarrative shadow – shadow as artistic subject and interpretative strategy at the same time – is the juxtaposition of the sculpture-sofa Colombra (Ruggeri, 1990), which depicts the silhouette of a shadow while simulating the figure of a dove with its hands, and the charcoal and watercolour drawing Untitled (Jürgenssen, 1983), depicting the shadow of a body as it transforms into a bird.

Birgit Jürgenssen e Cinzia Ruggeri, “Lonely Are All Bridges”, installation view, curated by Maurizio Cattelan and Marta Papini, Fondazione ICA Milano, Milano. Ph. Andrea Rossetti
The viewer’s attention is taken through a labyrinth of reflections between form and concept, between the concreteness of design and oneiric imagination, between Cinzia and Birgit. It is precisely the reflection, the mirror, that is the last step in this journey, which concludes in a sheltered area, hidden behind the central wall of the main room, which seems to push the visitor beyond the wall of convention and beyond the imaginative unconscious of the two women. Here, on two opposite walls, there are on one side photographic self-portraits by Jürgenssen (Untitled, 1979-80), whose moving figure seems to be trapped in the deformation of the mirror, and on the other a real mirror (Schatzi, 1995-97) that Ruggeri has placed in a velvet frame with three pairs of hands leaning outwards. Thus, not only the visitor who is reflected in it but also the self-portrait of the unknown art partner, placed exactly opposite, will be involved in this spectator circuit.
Info:
Birgit Jürgenssen e Cinzia Ruggeri. Lonely are all bridges
curated by Maurizio Cattelan and Marta Papini
16.01.25 – 15.03.25
Fondazione ICA Milano
Via Orobia 26, Milano
www.icamilano.it

Graduate in Philosophy from the University of Milan, where she currently lives, she specialized in aesthetics and contemporary criticism. Passionate of the art world and devoted to research, she believes in the potential of the interdisciplinary gaze, which intertwines critical thinking, typical of philosophical backgroud, and the communicative power of art to shape the evolving identity of its time.
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