Thaddaeus Ropac Signs Performance Star Florentina Holzinger Holzinger steps into the gallery world ahead of Venice spotlight

By Daniel Cassady

When Thaddaeus Ropac announced this week that he would begin representing Florentina Holzinger, it landed as more than a standard roster update. Holzinger has spent the past decade building a reputation as one of Europe’s most uncompromising performance artists. She has filled opera houses and theaters with motorbikes, helicopters, heavy machinery, nudity, and feats of endurance that test what a body can withstand. What she has not had, until now, is gallery representation.

That changes just as she prepares to represent Austria at the 61st Venice Biennale later this year.

For Holzinger, who trained in choreography and moved quickly into large-scale theatrical productions, the shift into a commercial gallery context marks a new chapter. For Ropac, whose program has long included painters and sculptors with institutional weight, it is a sign of how porous the lines between performance and visual art have become.

“Florentina’s work has an unmistakable, singular aesthetic,” Ropac said. “She continually challenges conventions with her genre-defying practice, meticulously layering ideas, narratives and radical techniques to address the most urgent subjects of our time.” He added that her practice “establishes new ways of working with the body, as subject and medium and as a means of agency.”

Holzinger is already well established in performance circles. Her productions have won the Nestroy Award and the Faust Award, and her work has been selected four years in a row for Berlin’s Theatertreffen. Since 2021, she has been an associate artist at the Volksbühne in Berlin. She has also developed an ongoing series of site-specific works titled Études, staged with institutions including Schinkel Pavillon, Bergen Kunsthall, and Wiener Festwochen.