Valie Export, Avant-Garde Icon and Feminist Trailblazer, Dies at 85

By Vittoria Benzine

Valie Export, the brave performer, sculptor, and filmmaker who pushed the global vanguard of feminist art, died yesterday, aged 85.

“The artist’s groundbreaking films and performances in the 1960s and 1970s introduced a new form of radical, embodied feminism to Europe,” Export’s gallery, Thaddaeus Ropac, noted while announcing her death. “The multidisciplinary nature of Export’s ‘Expanded Cinema’ practice, and her use of her own body as an artistic medium, position her as one of the earliest performance artists alongside Joseph Beuys and Allan Kaprow.” Ropac’s notice lists no cause of death, nor survivors.

Export was born Waltraud Lehner in Linz, Austria—which opened a media research center devoted to her in 2016—amid the throes of World War II. Her father died while fighting for the Nazis. Export dropped out of Catholic school at 14, then got married and had a daughter at 18. Two years later, she divorced her husband, placed her daughter with her sister, and left for Vienna, where she studied painting, drawing, and design at the National School for Textile Industry just as the Viennese Actionist movement hit its stride. Although Export orbited the all-male group, she considered herself a separate phenomenon.

In 1967, Export gave that phenomenon a title, changing her given name to the moniker unanimously associated with her today. Her first name, Valie, came from a nickname for her given first name. Her self-appointed surname, however, came from a popular cigarette brand.