Thaddaeus Ropac has announced the representation of acclaimed Austrian multidisciplinary artist Florentina Holzinger, whose practice is radically reshaping the contemporary artistic landscape. Trained in choreography, Holzinger moved early from dance towards producing shows that expand her work to theatre, opera and visual arts. Combining extreme physicality with theatrical precision to probe the limits of corporeal agency, she deliberately operates across and between established artistic categories, while critically engaging with their histories, and blends legitimised ‘high’ culture with pop and countercultural currents to unsettle the lines between spectacle and subversion.
Selected to represent Austria at the forthcoming Biennale Arte 2026, Venice, her presentation SEAWORLD VENICE will expand beyond the pavilion and across the city through site-specific performances this May through to November 2026. Ropac’s first gallery presentation of her work will be in the autumn of 2027.
Florentina’s work has an unmistakable, singular aesthetic. 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. Her practice establishes new ways of working with the body, as subject and medium and as a means of agency. The objects she creates are an extension of the physical possibilities of the body – whether presented to us in her choreography, opera, performance or visual art. Florentina is always challenging and elucidating our perception of existence and shifting reality in ways that are powerful and profoundly moving.
— Thaddaeus Ropac
My work thrives on navigating or surfing between genres. 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. These are all things that I’m very playful with. What’s important for me is that I’m questioning the conventions and conditions of these places. In the theatre usually there’s a fixed spectatorship, in a gallery space you have a mobile spectatorship where the audience can determine how long they want to engage with the work. To go into a new space means challenging the different habits and conditions of that place, and the different types of expectations. To be in a visual arts context is for me a matter of taking on another space and is a particular inspiration for my work
— Florentina Holzinger
Working with her own body or predominantly female-identifying casts, Holzinger experiments with corporeal endurance and transgression to make power legible at the level of the body. In her compositions of image, sound and action, the body is the touchstone against which all objects and perceptions are measured. In collaboration with a team that brings expertise in a broad range of body-based practices and performance genres, her works experiment with body modification – in all its possible forms – as an interplay of transformation and illusion.
Elemental forces, such as water and bodily fluids, recur as material presences, used as agents that act upon bodies while implicating audiences witnessing them. Brought into relation or contrast with human presence and imbued with immanent layers of meaning, objects are regarded by the artist as charged, resonant entities, acting as projection surfaces with the capacity to offer friction or resistance, or to act transformatively.
Holzinger’s works have been awarded the Nestroy (TANZ, 2020) and Faust awards (Ophelia’s Got Talent, 2023) and have been selected by Theatertreffen Berlin four times in a row (TANZ, Ophelia’s Got Talent, SANCTA, A Year Without Summer). Besides her stage productions, Holzinger creates Études, an ongoing series of site-specific, one-off performances in public space that have been presented in collaboration with Schinkel Pavillon Berlin, Bergen Kunsthall, Berlin Atonal festival and Wiener Festwochen, among others. Since 2021, she is associate artist at Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, Berlin. In 2026, she will represent Austria at the Biennale Arte 2026, Venice.
