Renate Bertlmann: Zärtlichkeit als Widerstand

Levy Galerie, Alt-Moabit 110, 10559, Berlin

September 10, 2026 – October 18, 2026

Born in Vienna in 1943, Renate Bertlmann is a key figure of the feminist avant-garde of the 1970s. For five decades, she has explored love, sexuality and power through photography, sculpture, objects, installations, performances and drawings, using a language that oscillates between tenderness and aggression, irony and vulnerability. Pacifiers, knives, condoms and latex become both carriers of bodily experience and symbols of social categorization. At the centre of her work is resistance to patriarchal oppression and the right to self-determination. Bertlmann subjects marriage, binary gender roles and religious imagery to precise inversions: vulnerability becomes a weapon, submission a provocation, and the sacred a site of subversive wit. Kitsch, pornography and confrontation meet directly, producing work that is simultaneously comic and uncompromising.