In Ursula Reuter Christiansen’s art we encounter beauty and demons, fire and water, love and hate as well as fairy tales and mythology – all inextricably entangled with experiences from the artist’s own life. Her works are, at once, narrative, political and sensory. But who really is the person behind this long and glorious artistic career?

1. Reuter Christiansen comes from the German city of Trier. She was born in 1943 in the middle of World War II and grew up in the bleak post-war period. Her father, who returned from a Soviet prison camp a few years after the end of the war, wanted her to become a high school teacher, but Reuter Christiansen had her own ideas for her future. In 1965, she was admitted as one of only a few women to the Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Arts, which at the time was considered one of the most renowned art academies in the world.

2. The artist has been active in the women’s movement throughout her life, and feminism has always been an essential part of Reuter Christiansen’s life as well as of her art. After graduating from the academy in Düsseldorf, she went north with her husband, the composer Henning Christiansen, more precisely, to an old farm on Møn, which has been the artist’s home ever since. In the early 1970s, she became deeply involved in the Danish feminist movement and has played an important role in the struggle for women’s rights ever since.

3. Reuter Christiansen works with paintings, films, sculptures and spatial installations. She herself describes her process as an interest in dialectics and transformation. A transformation where she takes stories, often women’s stories or stories from her own life, and leads them on a journey from the private sphere and out into the open. In other words, Reuter Christiansen works to a large extent, in close interaction with ideas and narratives borrowed from fairy tales and mythology, to convey other women’s as well as her own stories, thereby transforming these female destinies into her incomparable works of art.

You can experience Ursula Reuter Christiansen’s exhibition I Am Water and Fire at the museum from 22.08.24 – 05.01.25.
Read more about Ursula Reuter Christiansen’s exhibition I Am Water and Fire here.

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References:

Lisbeth Bonde, ”Hun lægger aldrig fingrene imellem”, Kunsten.nu, 29. november 2023.
Mai Dengsøe, “On Identity, War, Feminism and the Autobiographical Method in Ursula Reuter Christiansen’s Practice”, AWARE, November 12, 2021.
Rasmus Elmelund, ”To år med pandemi og hårdt arbejde har ikke gjort noget godt for Ursula Reuters sortsyn”, Information, Kultur, December 28, 2021.
Erik Jensen, ”Jeg får spat af at alle de her tossede bedsteforældre skal have sex”, Politiken, Kultur, August 15, 2020.