Last night, Ursula Reuter Christiansen had a dream. An enormous eagle swooped down and grabbed the German-Danish artist, before dropping her in a strange land which she calls, ‘the country of the old people’. Now in her eighties, Reuter Christiansen is something of a matriarchal figure in Denmark, where she has lived since the end of the 1960s.
Through the 1970s, she was at the forefront of the women’s movement and the first female professor of painting at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen (1997–2006). Her artistic world is deeply personal, filled with allusion to mythology and fairy-tale, the natural world, and the role of women. ‘I have always said that I am my pictures, my pictures are me,’ she explains. At times, Reuter Christiansen was criticised by other feminists for being too melancholic or even too feminine in her art; worse still when she took her husband’s name.
