Overview
- Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery confirmed Thursday that VALIE EXPORT died in Vienna on May 14 at age 85, three days before her 86th birthday.
- She made the female body her primary material, staging works like Tap and Touch Cinema in 1968, where strangers felt her breasts through a curtained box to expose the mechanics of the male gaze.
- In Action Pants: Genital Panic, she entered a Munich cinema in crotchless trousers to collapse the distance between viewer and viewed, a gesture that drew outrage, threats, and indecency charges.
- Born Waltraud Lehner in Linz in 1940, she adopted the name VALIE EXPORT in 1967 to reject taking a father’s or husband’s surname and to assert a self-made artistic identity.
- Her influence spans decades of exhibitions and teaching, from becoming one of the first women to represent Austria at the Venice Biennale in 1980 with Maria Lassnig to major retrospectives and a dedicated research center in Linz.