Biography

Birger Jesch was born in Dresden, Germany in 1953. From 1962 to 1965 he was at the Unitäts children’s home of the Herrnhuter Brüdergemeine. He became a painter and worked for the German State Railway. Since the 1970s he has been collecting experiences in various sub-cultures in the former GDR (Tramper, Kunden). From 1979 on he has been heavily engaged in the Mail Art network. Together with the Dresden-based mail artists Jürgen Gottschalk, Martina and Steffen Giersch and Joachim Stange he was filed and “arranged” as OV “Feind” (“enemy”) by the “Staatssicherheit” (the secret police of the GDR). In 1986 he moved to Thuringia, Germany.
From 1982 on he participated in autonomous original graphic editions, like “und”, “spinne” and “entwerter/oder”. His workscopes became: concrete poetry, action-, and conceptual art. On the occasion of the first free elections in the former GDR (March 1990), he carried out a lonely hearts ad project, that he made accessable to the public ten years later in the “Collection Anna Blume” in Weimar, Waren/Müritz and Berlin. Since 2003 he has been interested in portraits, using silhouettes and pochoirs.
In 2007 he had an intense retrospective of his conceptual art together with his mail art partner Jürgen O. Olbrich at ACC in Weimar.

Links

http://www.schattenriss.net (de)
http://www.vbkth.de/?112,1348 (de)
Deutsches Historisches Museum_Boheme und Diktatur (de): http://www.dhm.de/archiv/ausstellungen/boheme/katalog_zentren/dresden/dresd71.htm
http://www.museum-schwerin.de/headnavi/forschung-wissenschaft/mail-art-archiv-3 (de)
East European Mail Art (en): http://www.leftcurve.org/LC21WebPages/eeurmail.html
Interview_Mail Art (en): http://www.iuoma.org/birger.html
Thüringer Künstlerverband_VBK (de): http://www.vbkth.de/?115,1057
PING-PONG: Birger Jesch und Jürgen O. Olbrich – Die Bilanz einer 25jährigen Künstlerfreundschaft (de): http://old.acc-weimar.de/ausstellungen/a2007/a170/index.html