VALIE EXPORT Queen of Cool

By Thomas Mießgang

In recent years, VALIE EXPORT (she requested that her name be capitalized) could often be seen in Vienna's Kettenbrückengasse, near her longtime residence. She mingled with the locals at neighborhood festivals, visited souvenir shops, and chatted with them. She was an approachable avant-garde artist who didn't make a fuss about herself and didn't hide her Upper Austrian dialect. Yet, alongside Maria Lassnig, she was Austria's most important contemporary artist and had long since become a living legend and an icon of feminism.

Since the 1990s, she received a steady stream of prizes, awards, honorary doctorates, and professorships. Only the most prestigious Austrian award for visual artists, the Grand State Prize, eluded her, as she noted with a touch of bitterness last year. Now, that will no longer be the case. VALIE EXPORT died in Vienna on May 14, 2026, shortly before her 86th birthday.

But even without a state prize, Waltraud Lehner, born in Linz in 1940, shattered all the boundaries imposed by her humble background – her mother was a war widow with three daughters to support – and her provincial origins. At the age of 20, the former convent school student and aspiring artist knew she had to broaden her sphere of influence if she wanted to be heard and seen. She moved to Vienna and plunged into the whirlwind of the radical avant-garde movement that was then emerging there.