The artist Valie Export, who has died aged 85, was celebrated for bold, witty, often challenging works in performance, film, photography and sculpture. She was part of a global generation of feminist artists who used their bodies to challenge the representation of women and the social structures imposed on them. Women must “make use of all media as a means of social struggle and as a means for social progress in order to liberate culture from masculine values”, she wrote.
For Export, art carried revolutionary potential.
Though born Waltraud Lehner, in 1967 she changed her name to Valie Export – which she always styled in block capitals – blending her nickname with the Smart Export cigarette brand. In the self-portrait Valie Export – Smart Export (1970), she brandishes a modified soft pack. “Made in Austria” the label reads: “Valie Export”. Around a logo carrying her face runs the motto semper et ubique – always and everywhere. In one gesture, Export cut herself loose from patronymics – the names of her father and ex-husband – and announced herself as an independent, productive entity.
The block capitals were a clue to her broader interest in expansion and taking up public space. For the work Adjunct Dislocations (1973) she expanded her body, walking and exercising with 8mm cameras strapped front and back to offer multiple perspectives.
Among her celebrated and notorious early works were experiments in “expanded cinema”. In 1968, accompanied by the artist and curator Peter Weibel – then her partner – she staged Touch and Grope Cinema. Export positioned herself on the streets of Munich and Vienna with a “cinema” strapped to her chest, inviting members of the public to enter with their hands and touch her exposed breasts. In a normal movie theatre, men could sit in the dark and enjoy the sight of women’s bodies without scrutiny. In Touch and Grope Cinema, the female body was met by the hand rather than the eye, and the audience exposed to the artist’s scrutiny.
In 1969 Export staged Action Pants: Genital Panic, walking through spectators at an avant-garde film festival in Munich wearing jeans with the pubic area removed. The lights were on, permitting – or perhaps forcing – a full view. Later that year she posed for the photographer Peter Hassmann, sitting with legs splayed, her hair in a punkish bird’s nest, toting a machine gun. Action Pants: Genital Panic disrupted erotic conventions, exposing a real woman’s body in a shameless display that read more as aggressive than available. Hassmann’s photograph was made into silkscreen prints with which Export fly-posted public spaces in Vienna.
Born in Linz, Austria, during the second world war, Waltraud was one of three sisters. Her mother became a war widow when Waltraud was two years old. Educated at a convent, she was expelled more than once before transferring to the School of Applied Arts in Linz. Aged 14 she took her first photograph – a self-portrait – with a friend’s camera. Role-play and performance would later become important themes.
Aged 18, in 1958 she married Ernst Alois Höllinger, and gave birth to a daughter, Perdita. In 1960 they separated – she left Perdita with her sister, and moved to Vienna to study at the Federal Higher Institute for Textile Industry.
Her studies coincided with the emergence of Viennese Actionism, a radical art movement rooted in ceremonial and often violent performances. While she supported the group’s criticism of bourgeois society and state authority, she disliked their misrepresentation of women and the use of the female body as mere “material”.
Sexism within the art scene aroused her commitment to feminism, leading her to examine the social roles imposed on women as well as the art-historical invisibility of female artists. “The examination of the female body as a representation in images had thus imposed itself on me,” Export wrote. “Theory came later.” In 1970, she wrote Women’s Art: A Manifesto, and in 1975 curated Magna, an exhibition platforming the work of other female artists. In 1980, she and Maria Lassnig were the first women to represent Austria at the Venice Biennale.
Frequently controversial, Export’s work was not fully appreciated until the early 21st century. The Austrian curator Gabriele Schor, director of the Verbund Collection in Vienna, acknowledged her foundational position in the feminist avant-garde: “In 1968 Valie Export was the first female artist to make a provocative, powerful and feminist artistic statement in the encrusted, male-dominated Viennese art scene.”
In 2015 the Valie Export Center opened in Linz. A research centre housing her extensive archive of artistic and curatorial projects, it occupies the old tobacco factory that once produced Smart Export cigarettes.
A film-maker, academic and organiser as well as an artist, Export co-founded the Austrian Filmmakers Cooperative in 1968, and was professor for multimedia and performance at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne until 2005. Her late career was marked by an abundance of awards including, in 2014, the Yoko Ono Lennon Courage Award for the Arts. In 2023 she was the subject of a substantial retrospective at the Albertina Museum in Vienna.
Export’s second husband, Robert Stockinger, died in 2016, and her daughter, Perdita, died earlier this year. She is survived by a sister, Elisabeth, and a grandson, Patrick.
• Valie Export (Waltraud Lehner), artist, born 17 May 1940; died 14 May 2026
