Gittan Jönsson

Trekking in Time: Gittan Jönsson

Vandrerskan by Gittan Jönsson, photo: Anna Inteman

A few years ago, Gittan Jönsson found an advertising illustration in a women’s magazine from the fifties. The image showed a smiling, vacuum cleaning woman, advertising panty liners. The text read: Live as normal! This image of the cleaning woman entered Gittan Jönsson’s paintings during 2004 and has since then almost become her trademark, since her art readily questions the stereotyping of the traditional gender roles of women.

The cleaning woman has a political mission; she turns up in different situations and contexts. She is penetrating the male dominated world of art history, calling on the old masters for a cleaning spree. In Vandrerskan she is calling on the Romantic landscape painter Caspar David Friedrich.

The vacuuming Vandrerskan is penetrating the man’s painting as well as his territory. Her presence emphasizes that for women, nature has historically been an inaccessible space and the journey a male privilege. Times change however, and now the The Female Wanderer is standing on the top of the mountain, gazing into a new future.

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