Radical Performance Artist Florentina Holzinger Joins Thaddaeus Ropac

By Kate Brown

Florentina Holzinger, reknowned for boundary-pushing performances involving nudity, stunts, and maximalist spectacle, has joined Thaddaeus Ropac gallery just months before unveiling her project for the Austrian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.

The blue-chip gallery’s addition of the Austrian-born, Netherlands-based artist, whose stomping ground lies squarely in the dance and theater worlds, reflects the art world’s growing interest in bold, interdisciplinary practices, especially performance art.

Known for elaborately produced performance works that push both her performers and her audiences to the brink of discomfort, Holzinger is a master of provocation and bending the boundaries of taste.

While she may be a relatively new name to the art world, her confirmation for the Austrian pavilion at the Venice Biennale, with the work “Seaworld Venice” comes on the heels of major, sold-out presentations in Paris, Berlin, Vienna, and elsewhere. Trained in choreography, the artist has been moving from dance towards theater, opera, and visual art in recent years. She has had recent institutional outings at Schinkel Pavilion in Berlin and Bergen Kunsthalle in Norway. Ropac is planning her first-ever gallery show in 2027.

“My work thrives on navigating or surfing between genres,” Holzinger said in a statement about her gallery representation. She added that in a theater setting, usually there’s a fixed spectatorship; in a gallery space you have a mobile spectatorship where the audience can determine how long they want to engage with the work. “To go into a new space means challenging the different habits and conditions of that place, and the different types of expectations. To be in a visual arts context is for me a matter of taking on another space and is a particular inspiration for my work.”