Vienna, Austria · ARTnews
Valie Export, Pioneering Feminist Artist, Dies at 85
Austrian artist Valie Export, whose work centered on the female body and challenged conceptual art's boundaries, has died at 85. Her four-decade practice established her as a foundational figure in feminist and performance art.
Valie Export pioneered body-based performance and conceptual art from the 1960s onward, using her own physicality to interrogate gender, representation, and the nature of artistic practice itself. Her statement that 'the center of my work is the body, and moreover, the female body' encapsulated her foundational contribution to feminist discourse in visual art. Export's work challenged institutional definitions of what constituted art, influencing generations of artists working with performance, documentation, and the body as medium.
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