Alexandra Bircken
Born: 1967
Cologne (Allemagne)
Elle vit et travaille à Berlin et Munich (Allemagne).
Alexandra Bircken lives and works in Berlin and Munich, Germany.
She grew up in the Black Forest before moving to an industrial town in North Rhine-Westphalia. In high school she established foundational, lasting friendships with Lutz Huelle, who became a designer, and Wolfgang Tillmans, who is now an internationally recognised photographer. All three of them loved visual culture that thwarted dominant trends.They were fascinated by British pop culture, and fully participated in the post-pop trend of the 1980s, with its music, dress codes and lifestyle.
Alexandra Bircken moved to London in the early 1990s, where she joined the fashion department at the prestigious Central Saint Martins College of Art. It was then a hotspot of creativity where John Galliano, Stella McCartney and Alexander McQueen studied. After graduating in 1995, Alexandra Bircken started her own label and developed an independent fashion career in London, and later in Paris.
Returning to Germany in the early 2000s, little by little she turned her back on fashion. Her clothing and accessories increasingly eluded customary categories, becoming fully-fledged works of art. Berge is a knitted sculpture created in 2003. In 2004, the artist had her first solo exhibition at BQ in Cologne.
Since then, Alexandra Bircken has taken part in major group exhibitions like Unmonumental at the New Museum in New York in 2007, Sculptural Acts at Haus der Kunst in Munich in 2011, and Material Encounters at the Hepworth Wakefield in England in 2019. Since 2018, she has been teaching sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich.
She is now a major artist in German-speaking countries and in the UK.
The exhibition that the Museum Brandhorst and the Crac Occitanie have jointly dedicated to her offers a chance to see a broad overview of her work in France.
