INTERVENTION#2 - Irena Pejčić

With the exhibition series INTERVENTION, Galerie Ruberl invites emerging artists to place their works in dialogue with pieces from the gallery’s collection. The encounter between different generations and artistic positions creates new perspectives and opens unexpected ways of looking at familiar works.

In this edition, Irena Pejčić asks: What does it mean to show a body? And whose gaze determines what becomes visible in the process?

These questions form the starting point of Pejčić’s artistic practice. Through photography, installation, and sculpture, she explores the body as a site of experience, social attribution, and resistance.

The female body is omnipresent in our visual culture, yet it has been shaped almost exclusively through the male gaze—smoothed, idealized, and reduced to a standard that reflects neither reality nor diversity. It is precisely this logic that Irena Pejčić consistently rejects.

For this intervention, the artist has selected works from three of her series: Vulvae, the installation Cycle (Zyklus), and photographs documenting the performance Wollust.

In the photographic series Vulvae, she directs attention to a part of the body that reveals much about society’s relationship to female anatomy: a body part that, in public imagery, is largely defined by shame, insecurity, or pornographic standardization. Pejčić presents real, unaltered bodies—without staging, retouching, or the aesthetic filters that have long shaped perceptions of the female body. The diversity of forms on view is not a provocation but a matter of fact. It points to the reality of embodied existence and places the equal value of difference at its center.

In the installation Cycle (Zyklus), two archaic substances encounter one another: blood and earth. Drop by drop, blood falls onto a bed of moss—slowly, rhythmically, incessantly. The temporality of this movement is not a dramaturgical device but the work’s actual subject. The installation resists external judgment and insists on its own internal logic: a cycle that can neither be accelerated nor stopped.

Wollust begins with a social diagnosis and responds with an image. The photographs emerging from the performance bring together bodies of many different kinds into a community that does not present itself for evaluation, but instead asserts itself as a chorus—and an argument—for its own diversity.

In the juxtaposition curated by Irena Pejčić, her works are presented alongside pieces by Arnulf Rainer, Michael Horsky, Franz Ringel, Hermann Nitsch, and others. This dialogue reveals different approaches to the representation of the body. Their common ground lies in a shared interest in the body as an artistic medium. At the same time, the exhibition highlights the differing regimes of looking through which bodies are represented, perceived, and judged.

INTERVENTION #2 – Irena Pejčić

Opening: July 14, 2026, 6:00–8:00 pm

The artist will be present.