CHART – Window Shopper

23.8 – 1.9.19

Window shopper  explores the envy which people in the art world feel towards people in the fashion world. It is about Art putting on a ballgown, dancing the night away, turning into a pumpkin, and uttering its critique of capitalism as a love poem.

Today large fashion houses such as Trussardi, Fiorucci, Prada and Louis Vuitton all want to make stores that look like gallery and museum exhibitions, all the while having apparently forgotten the fact that the white cube of the modern art exhibition was actually attempting to imitate department stores, desiring their ability to abstract objects from their surroundings, making them portals into the viewer/shopper’s personal projections and desires.

Window shopper  revolves around the economic distribution and artistic space of possibility, which we as artists imagine exist in the glamorous world of fashion stores. How an object in a fashion store may well be a copy of something else and still postulate being unique. How art is always trying so hard to figure out how to approach and be in closer proximity to the lived lives of people, while fashion has not even considered that there could be a difference between life and art. Because garments are made to be filled, they are always lacking a body and immediately embrace it when the two finally meet – they accept the body’s contagion, absorb its fragrance, make-up and rejected cells. The clothes in display windows, on the other hand, are still just promises of potential, future versions of yourself.

Written by Hannah Heilmann and Anna & Esben Weile Kjær

Annabell and Beatrice, 2019

Clothes – and especially dresses and furs – have occupied Ursula Reuter Christiansen for as long as she can remember and through the years they have played a central part in her performances and video works. For her clothes is not just something you wear. Clothes are history and identity. This is precisely the reason why she made weekly visits to Birger Christensen during her time as a professor at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in the 1990’s. Mostly as a window shopper, and once as an actual shopper. The fur coat which is now part of the installation, was bought at Birger Christensen and for many years both the extravagant fur and its price were kept a secret for both the artist’s family and close friends. In 2019 Birger Christensen celebrates their 150 year anniversary and bringing them together with Reuter Christiansen highlights both the brand and the artist’s equally iconic statuses in the Danish cultural scene.

Ursula Reuter Christiansen (b. 1943, Germany) has been a central figure on the Danish art scene since the 1970’s and continues to inspire with the landmark feminist agenda in her works.

Birger Christensen, Østergade 38, 1100 Copenhagen K