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.
Venice will bring that world into sharp focus.
Her Biennale presentation, titled Seaworld Venice, takes the Austrian Pavilion as its starting point and expands across the city through performances on water, in the air, and on land. The project grows out of her long-running fascination with water as material and metaphor. The pavilion becomes, in the words of curator Nora-Swantje Almes, an organism of sorts: part underwater theme park, part sewage plant, part sacred site. The work moves between spectacle and ritual, drawing attention to rising sea levels, waste, and the human body as both agent and casualty within a damaged ecosystem.
Almes, who serves as Curator of the Live Programme at Berlin’s Gropius Bau and is overseeing Austria’s pavilion, describes Holzinger’s imagery as something she “had never seen before,” recalling ballet with motorbikes and performers suspended from hooks. In Venice, she frames Seaworld Venice as an apocalyptic scenario that is already here, one that confronts viewers with “lives lived in the waste of others.”
Portrait of Florentina Holzinger, 2024. Photo: Elsa Okazaki
Holzinger has for years been interested in how context reshapes meaning. “My work thrives on navigating or surfing between genres,” she said in a press release. “It looks for different contexts to exist within and explores questions of who belongs in which space, who belongs on which stage and who belongs in which gallery.” She pointed to the difference between fixed spectatorship in the theatre and the mobile spectatorship of a gallery, where viewers control how long they stay. Entering a visual arts context, she said, means addressing a new set of habits and expectations.
Performance artists often operate outside the market, with funding tied to public institutions or festivals. Gallery representation offers a different structure: a way to place objects, relics, and documentation into collections, and to support production at scale. Ropac’s first gallery presentation of Holzinger’s work is slated for 2027, after her Venice appearance.
The announcement’s timing feels strategic. Representing Austria at Venice guarantees global attention, and Seaworld Venice promises imagery that will likely travel far beyond the pavilion’s walls. Holzinger’s work is built for headlines and for debate. It is also built for institutions, with a visual language that can translate from stage to exhibition space.
For Ropac, whose galleries in Salzburg, Paris, London, Milan, and Seoul have increasingly embraced artists who blur disciplines, the addition signals confidence in performance as a central force within contemporary art. For Holzinger, it opens a new arena, one where questions she has long staged in theaters will now play out in white cubes and art fairs.
Venice, a city defined by water and spectacle, will be her proving ground. The gallery world is lining up just in time.
