Juno Birch’s Worlds

Juno Birch paints breasts and women and sex and power like nobody else. Her work splits people—some try to decode it, understand what she’s saying. Others want it off the wall, burned, gone. But that split, that recoil, that’s where the art lives.

She’s a British artist, and her paintings and sculptures are windows into skewed feminist worlds. She interprets the universe from a female perspective. Breasts, pussies, lecherous men. In her work, logic doesn’t apply. Women are rulers and objects. Individual and cliché. Repulsive and sexy.

You look at them and don’t know if you’re identifying or being put off by the pure strangeness. The weirdness is deliberate. She’s showing you something true about how women see themselves and how the world sees them, and she’s not softening it. No apologies. Just the thing itself.

I think what I like about it is that she doesn’t treat feminist art like something noble or clean. She treats it like the complicated, contradictory, sexual, ugly thing that it actually is. Most art about women tries to make it palatable. Hers doesn’t.

Her work still splits people the same way. She seems fine with that.