Jytte Rex: Dreams and furious laughter

Through more than 70 works spanning six decades, the retrospective exhibition Jytte Rex: Dreams and Furious Laughter revolves around the relationship between sensuality, the enigmatic changeability of the world and the inner life of man.

Jytte Rex's art grew out of the feminist avant-garde art of the 1960s and 1970s, which looked critically at the social conditions that women experienced in their time. In Jytte Rex's work, rebellion takes an artistic and poetic form, with room for sensual dreams as well as furious laughter.

Exposes the photograph to vandalism

Jytte Rex moves across media and art forms, and the exhibition shows her photographic works together with a selection of her films, artist books, sculptures, and radio montages, created from the 1960s to the present day.

Photography is a pervasive art form with many possibilities for Jytte Rex. She processes her photographic motifs in layers, so that materials and motifs break with the documentary nature of photography and create new layers of meaning and impression. Rex herself describes how she exposes the photograph to vandalism and searches for “an almost magical cohesion between motif and personal feeling”.

The exhibition also includes source and archive material from, among other things, Royal Danish Library's collection of journals and the artist's own archive, which provides insight into the contemporaneity of the works and the artist's process.

Jytte Rex

Visual artist, filmmaker and author Jytte Rex (b. 1942) is a pioneer in avant-garde art, and her works from the 1960s and 1970s, such as the feminist neoclassic "Kvindernes Bog" (trans: "The Women's Book")(1972), have influenced the Danish women's movement.

Jytte Rex has exhibited at Statens Museum for Kunst, Glyptoteket, Museet for Samtidskunst and Kunsten Museum of Modern Art Aalborg, among others. Rex has received a wide range of awards and honours, including the Danish Arts Foundation's lifetime achievement award and the Thorvaldsen Medal.

The exhibition is curated by Charlotte Præstegaard Schwartz and Maja Gro Gundersen.