VIENNA.- To mark the 85th birthday of Florentina Pakosta (*1933 in Vienna), the Albertina Museum is mounting a large-scale retrospective totaling over 100 works. Over the many decades of her career, Pakosta has continually and consistently championed feminist positions and concerns.

In parallel to this exhibition, the Albertina Museum is working together closely with the artist to produce a full catalog of her works in order to provide a basis for future research and analysis of her oeuvre.

In contrast to other representatives of the feminist avant-garde, Florentina Pakosta refrains from dealing with her own body as a projection surface, instead preferring to use the bodies of powerful men. In her Satirical Works, she criticizes patriarchal power structures by way of exaggeration. From the very beginning, here, the role(s) of women and their inequality with those of men are clearly in focus. This theme runs throughout her entire oeuvre like a golden thread: in surreal studies of the human body, individuals melt together with the accessories of their attributes—thus morphing into hybrid beings that consist partly of toilet bowls, scissors, scalpels, or weapons.

The Physiognomy of Power
This exhibition draws a broad arc from the 1970s to the immediate present, a period that has borne witness to Florentina Pakosta’s unbroken political and social activism. Her oeuvre concentrates largely on the medium of drawing. In terms of content, the spectrum of Pakosta’s topics ranges from meticulously formulated physiognomic studies and surreally alienated bodies to monumental portrait-drawings. In a surrealistic manner, she combines her physiognomies with vices, saws, or knives, also elongating lips into birds’ beaks or placing objects upon her figures’ heads as strange trophies that at once demystify and unmask these caricatures of male power. And in larger-format drawings, she devotes her attention to the grimaces and masks worn by males as part of their gender-coded wielding of power in a way that echoes the works of sculptor Franz Xaver Messerschmidt (1736–1783).

It was only during the late 1970s that Pakosta began working on canvas, and it was several years thereafter that color finally made its first appearance in her output. And her 1980s Menschenmassen (Human Masses) and Warenlandschaften (Merchandise Landscapes), for their part, begin to feature the individual’s vanishing into the masses and the disappearance of the subject.

Merciless Gaze
Again and again, we encounter self-portraits showing Florentina Pakosta in poses that are at turns serious, self-confident, or pugnacious. 1976 saw the completion of a self-portrait behind a barbed wire fence, shut out, an observer from the outside, denied access to the art world. In her self-portrait Zungenschlag (Punching Tongue), on the other hand, she portrays herself with her mouth open, an arm with a clenched fist extending from it.

Florentina Pakosta reverses the traditional division of roles between men and women. For centuries, male artists had portrayed women as objects or muses. It was the male gaze upon breasts, genitals, and feminine curves that formed women’s art-historical image, preserving it for posterity. Florentina Pakosta turns things around: she trains her artist’s gaze on the male, perceiving his will to power, to dominance. And in one series of drawings, she even concentrates exclusively on male genitals, focusing directly on them and only them—a perspective that effectively demystifies virility.

Abstraction and Color
Pakosta’s mid-1980s output gradually turns away from black-and-white figurative works in favor of a geometric and abstract visual language. Her consistently Tri color Paintings (Trikolore Bilder), a series of works that she has continued into the present, feature confrontations between colors that clash so energetically that they are almost painful to look at.

Her output’s development from figurative portrayals to a mode of painting that is entirely free of figurative elements and consists only of colored, geometric, and linear grid-structures is surprising. But these two differing visual worlds are united by one powerful commonality: their consistent linkage with present-day social conditions. Even her abstract works reveal structures of masculinity and aggressively dominated, impenetrable networks—a courageous and radical step that, for Florentina Pakosta, by no means entails a break with her previous output: “When their interplay is successful, the three colors demand from the viewer emotional flexibility, associative ability, imagination, and the dismantling of ossified thoughtmodels and prejudices.”