Florentina Pakosta counts among the great artists of the 20th century and the present. In her paintings and texts she deals with developments in society and consistently represents feminist concerns and positions.

In our sales exhibition "FLORENTINA PAKOSTA - Trikolore Bilder" we show selected, rare works by the artist from this focal point of her oeuvre. Also on display are works on paper and preliminary studies for Trikolore Bilder, which are on display at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg.

At the same time, the Museum der Moderne Salzburg is dedicating a double exhibition to the great artist entitled "Physiognomy of Power. Harun Farocki & Florentina Pakosta" a comprehensive retrospective. Opening December 8th, 2020.

Florentina Pakosta was born in Vienna in 1933 and studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. In her drawings and figurative representations she reacted to patriarchal power structures well into the late 1970s, experimenting with the most current styles of the time, until she decided on a new artistic path in 1989, a year of profound political changes. With her large-scale tricolor paintings, she detached herself from figuration and created impressive geometric abstractions in which two colors always dominate, while the third defines the pictorial space.

Her tricolor paintings have been an exciting and continuous focus of her work for almost thirty years, characterizing her own and specific painterly semantics. She needs no explanation, because the content of the pictures communicates itself visually to the viewer. Florentina Pakosta's painting of the Tricolor Pictures eludes superficial interpretation, even though many of them were created as a reaction to political events. They are symbols of upheaval.

The first Tricolor Pictures were created in 1989, the year of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Eastern Bloc. Three-dimensional landscapes of rubble made of roof beams and rails as a reminder of the wartime destruction in the Second World War and as a metaphor for the failure of socio-political visions.

Klaus Albrecht Schröder concluded his speech on the occasion of an exhibition opening of Florentina Pakosta 2011 with the words: "The tricolor pictures of Florentina Pakosta give no rest, because the world has not yet come to rest."

"Her tricolor pictures are an enormous step. (...) They come unexpectedly, but not unprepared in her work", Ernst Jandl wrote in a letter to Florentina Pakosta.

Fotocredit: Florentina Pakosta, 1994/1, 1994, Acryl auf Leinwand, 180 x 150 cm © Bildrecht Wien, 2020, Foto: Atelier Pakosta