"Art is political": With this succinct sentence, the action artist, filmmaker and performer Valie Export thanked for this year's Max Beckmann Prize.

Society needs the strength of “artistic politics”, according to Valie Export in her acceptance speech.

The award, worth 50,000 euros, was presented to her in Frankfurt's Paulskirche for her life's work.

According to Export, such a life's work depends on the circumstances, which is why she thanked above all those who had decided to work with her, even "in the very difficult times" that experimental and avant-garde art in the 1960s th century in Austria.

Everyone in the group at that time "made it".

Eva Maria Magel

Senior cultural editor of the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

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Valie Export has become known since the 1960s for numerous actions and interventions whose photographs have entered the collective visual memory.

Among other things, the performance “From the Mappe der Hundigkeit” from 1969, when Valie Export led her then artistic partner Peter Weibel for a walk on all fours in Vienna, is still known to many thanks to the photographs.

Feminist, radical, painful

The City of Frankfurt's Max Beckmann Prize honors the life's work of visual artists every three years, usually on Beckmann's birthday, February 12.

Because of the pandemic, June 18 was chosen as the date for the award this year.

It is the opening day of the Documenta in Kassel, where Valie Export was a participant back in 1977. Feminist, radical, often painful for the artist herself, but always laconic and humorous, which is often missing today, according to Ina Hartwig (SPD), head of the Frankfurt cultural department. be the work of Valie Exports.

The artist, who was born in Linz on May 17, 1940, is only the fifth woman, after Cindy Sherman, Agnès Varda, Barbara Klemm and Maria Lassnig, to receive the prize, which was founded in 1978.

Hartwig said in her speech: "In this way we are gradually approaching justice." Instead of a conventional eulogy, the Swiss performance and installation artist Sylvie Fleury produced a video clip entitled "Flower Tattoo" and Valie Export produced one in the form of a rhyming poem Description of life in key words and associations considered.