Valie Export | Biennale di Venezia 1980

Valie Export

Biennale di Venezia 1980

Austrian Federal Minisrty of Education and Art, 1980

128 pp., 27 x 21 cm., softcover

Edition size unknown

In 1980, Valie Export represented Austria (alongside Maria Lassnig) at the Venice Biennale - a rare instance of a female artist feted there at the height of her career, rather than its end. 

She presented Body Configurations (1972–76), a series of hand-tinted black-and-white photographs of the artist encircling the curve of a curb or conforming to the angle of a corner; Remote…Remote… (1973), a twelve-minute film of clipping her nails and dipping her bloody fingers into a bowl of milk [see below]; HOMO METER II (1976), performance documentation of Export walking down the street with a loaf of bread tied around her her neck, inviting passersby to cut themselves a slice; and Geburtenbett (1980), a “birthbed” consisting of a large rusty steel frame with bedsprings, a pair of fibreglass legs, and a small monitor displaying a priest performing mass, in place of the figure’s chest and head.

This exhibition catalogue - in Italian, German and English - was published on the occasion of the Venice Biennale, and is now quite scarce. 

Four decades later, Export remounted the Venice pavilion exhibition at the London Ely House, from November 2019 to January 2020. 

Export died in Vienna on May 14th of this year, three days before her 86th birthday.