The Art World Remembers Valie Export, Austrian Pioneer Of Feminist Performance Art The Art Newspaper International Art News And Events

The Austrian artist VALIE EXPORT died on 14 May 2026 in Vienna, three days before her 86th birthday. Her death was confirmed by Thaddaeus Ropac, the gallery that represented her. Born in 1940 in Linz as Waltraud Lehner, EXPORT became one of the most uncompromising artists of her generation, building a practice that placed the female body at the center of artistic and political struggle.

Her work was never content to illustrate feminist ideas from a distance. Instead, it tested the boundaries between body, image, and public space. In Tap and Touch Cinema, also known as TAPP und TASTKINO, staged across ten European cities from 1968 to 1971, she invited passers-by, mostly men, to reach through curtains attached to a box and touch her breasts. The piece remains one of the clearest statements of her challenge to the male gaze and the authority of patriarchy.

EXPORT extended that inquiry in Body Configurations, made between 1972 and 1976, in which she positioned her body against Vienna's architecture, wrapping herself around buildings and landmarks until the city itself became part of the work. The result was not simply performative spectacle, but a precise reordering of who gets to occupy public space and on what terms.

Her later work continued to resonate in institutional settings. In 2019, she showed Gerburtenbett, her 1980 birth bed installation, at Thaddaeus Ropac in London. The sculpture, which paired a rusted steel bed with a stream of red neon and a looped video of a Catholic priest saying mass, reflected her long-standing interest in the collision between sexuality, religion, and power. In that same period, she said in an interview that MeToo had been helpful, but that feminism had achieved only a fraction of its mission, pointing to the persistence of the wage gap.

Tributes from writers, artists, and museums have emphasized how widely EXPORT's influence spread. Hettie Judah described her as a hero to many women, while the Geneva-based culture writer Nazli Kok Akbas noted that her performances and media interventions transformed the female body from an object of representation into a site of political agency and resistance. Neuenationalgalerie in Berlin said it was deeply saddened by her death and noted that documentation of Tap and Touch Cinema is included in its current collection presentation.

EXPORT's legacy is now firmly embedded in the history of feminist art, but her work still feels urgent because it never treated the body as neutral. It treated the body as a battleground, a language, and a form of resistance.

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