Renate Bertlmann

Renate Bertlmann has been challenging social constructs surrounding gender and sexuality in her photographs, collages, performances, and sculptures since the 1970s. Bertlmann worked closely with the women’s liberation movement and collectives of female artists, co-founded Marebagroup in 1974, and exhibited her work in “MAGNA. Feminismus: Kunst und Kreativität (MAGNA: Feminism-Art and Creativity),” a landmark 1975 exhibition curated by Valie Export. Bertlmann represented Austria at the 2019 Venice Biennale with her installation as part of “Discordo ergo sum” (2019), which included a courtyard of neatly ordered red roses speared by swords and a series of black-and-white posters of her works from the 1970s and 80s. Bertlmann often transforms found objects into gendered artworks, morphing Styrofoam eggs into testicles in her series “Exhibitionism” (1973). Her works challenge gender roles, sometimes using objects to invert the associations between men and women—such as filling condoms with air to resemble breasts, thereby turning a phallic object into female anatomy.