Utrecht’s best-known transgender person on a quilt

Writer and artist Dirkje Kuik (Utrecht, 1929–2008) lived and worked in Utrecht all her life. The city appears time and again in her drawings, etchings, lithographs, paintings, prose, poetry and other writings. Kuik was a central figure in Utrecht’s artistic and literary circles. In 1964, she founded the printmakers’ collective De Luis together with Henc van Maarsseveen and Jopie Moesman. Kuik also became known for undergoing gender-affirming surgery in 1981: born William Diederich Kuik, she became the woman she had always been. From then on, Kuik fought for the right to be registered as a woman in the civil registry—a right she secured in 1985.

When Kuik died in 2008, the Centraal Museum exhibited her portfolio Views of Utrecht, which she created in 1972 on commission from the Oud-Utrecht association. These lithographs span fifteen years of architectural drawings of Utrecht, making them a fine example of how closely her work and life were intertwined with the city.

When the Utrecht branch of COC approached the museum last year about celebrating their seventieth anniversary there, we saw a wonderful opportunity to revisit Kuik’s life and work. I worked on this presentation with fellow curator Marja Bosma and trainee curator Minke van Schaik. We also wanted to highlight Kuik’s relevance to contemporary artists, so we invited the young artist Philipp Gufler (Augsburg, 1989).

Philipp Gufler’s quilts

Gufler studied in Munich and at De Ateliers in Amsterdam. That is where I became familiar with his work. His series of quilts in particular seemed to resonate with Dirkje Kuik in a distinctive way. Questioning heteronormative gender roles and gender identity is, after all, one of the recurring themes running through this series.

In 2014, Gufler began his series of quilts, which now comprises more than thirty pieces. These screen-printed textiles focus on artists, writers, LGBTIQ+ magazines and lost ‘queer spaces’ that are usually left out of mainstream history books. The subjects Gufler explores in his quilts play an important role not only in his artistic practice but also in his personal life. For each quilt, Gufler brings together images and text relating to its central subject, as in a collage.

The Utrecht Lokaal is a room with a distinctive character. Its windows, for instance, are a beautiful historical reminder of the former Convent of St Agnes. Artist Krijn de Koning also designed a striking glass exhibition structure that divides the space into compartments in an assertive yet subtle way. In this respect, the fragility of the slowly moving canvases stands in sharp contrast to the hard materials of glass and concrete. The compartments themselves lent themselves well to dividing the exhibition into short chapters, each focusing on a particular theme in Kuik’s work.

The first quilts Gufler made are essentially reflections on the AIDS crisis in Germany. As a young student at the art academy in Munich, Gufler realised that his knowledge of the AIDS crisis was largely based on American initiatives such as Act Up, Gran Fury and General Idea. Questions about how we can learn about local history, and who is remembered and who is not, prompted Gufler to volunteer at ‘Forum Queeres Archiv München e.V.’, an organisation dedicated to preserving, archiving and providing access to local history.

The first quilts focus on individuals who played an important role in activism surrounding the AIDS crisis in Munich and Germany. It is important to note here that homosexuality was illegal until the late 1960s under the so-called Paragraph 175, a German law dating from 1872 that was actively enforced during the Third Reich and was not fully repealed until 1994.

It is no coincidence that Gufler uses the quilt as the form for his commemorative project. He drew inspiration from the AIDS Memorial Quilt, initiated by activist Cleve Jones in San Francisco’s gay community in 1987. Each individual square of this quilt bears the name of someone who died of an AIDS-related illness. The quilt has since grown into a monument to collective, active and public mourning.

Over time, Gufler gradually broadened the focus of his quilts. Their subjects became increasingly closely connected to his own artistic practice and interests, and to his personal life.

For instance, he dedicated several quilts to historical queer magazines, such as Kellerjournal (Quilt # 13), published from 1980 to 1987 by the Verein für sexuelle Gleichberechtigung (Association for Sexual Equality) in Munich, and Kraximo (Quilt # 17), published from 1986 to 1992 by the Greek transgender activist Paola Revenioti (born 1958).

Quilt # 15 focuses on Die Freundin (The Girlfriend), a popular lesbian magazine published in Berlin from 1924 to 1933, during the Weimar Republic. Created by and for women, the magazine promoted a critical, cultural perspective. Die Freundin was forced to cease publication when the Nazis came to power in 1933.

Another recurring thread in Gufler’s quilts is historical figures, such as Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-1768) and Ludwig II (1845-1886). The pioneering German archaeologist and art historian Winckelmann was the first to divide Greek antiquity into chronological and stylistic periods. He was openly homosexual, and his descriptions of Greek sculptures read like homoerotic love letters. The right-hand section of Quilt #14 features Winckelmann’s description of a Greek sculpture. On the left, Gufler incorporates his own texts.

Ludwig II was one of the last kings of Bavaria. In the past, conservative political parties repeatedly presented him as a historical role model, conveniently ignoring his homosexuality. Others have described him as a madman who lived in isolation. In reality, Ludwig II had a rich social life and was open about his sexual orientation. The many love letters he wrote and the portraits and sculptures he commissioned of his lovers bear witness to this. Ludwig II drowned in the lake at his summer palace under suspicious circumstances. On the quilt, we see a young King Ludwig on the left, and the older King Ludwig with his lover on the right.

The people at the heart of Gufler’s quilts are closely connected to his own life and artistic practice. While studying at De Ateliers in Amsterdam, for instance, he learned about De Appel and the important role Wies Smals (1939–1983) played as the founder of this centre for contemporary art. The tension between public and private, as well as between what is visible and what remains unseen, plays an important role in this quilt. The sketches of De Appel’s exhibition space were made by Marijke van der Wijst (1940) and are shown alongside photographs from her private archive. Van der Wijst was Smals’s life partner until Smals’s tragic death in a plane crash in 1983.