Secession Podcast: Members is a series of conversations featuring members of the Secession. This episode is a conversation between the member Florentina Pakosta and the curator Melissa Lumbroso and the curator Jürgen Tabor. It was recorded on May 16, 2022.

Florentina Pakosta (b. 1933) is an Austrian artist and pioneer of the feminist avant-garde. Initially active as an artist working with drawing, a socio-critical realism prevailed at first, successively leading through the reduction of forms to her characteristic, abstract-geometric tricolour paintings. From 1952 to 1960 she studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague and Vienna. In 1971 she became a member of the Secession and from 1975 to 1983 she was its first female board member. In 1978 she curated the exhibition Secessionistinnen. Since 1975, the artist has published numerous short stories and art-theoretical texts. Her works are represented in renowned collections and museums, including the Albertina and the Museum der Moderne Salzburg. In 2023 she received the Austrian Art Prize.

Jürgen Tabor has been curator of the Generali Foundation Collection – Permanent Loan to the Museum der Moderne Salzburg since July 2019. He studied art history as well as English and American studies at the University of Innsbruck. Until 2017 he was curator, deputy and interim director of TAXISPALAIS, Kunsthalle Tirol, then curator of the Klocker Foundation and the Biennale Innsbruck International. As a freelance curator he realized projects in Bolzano, Madrid, Vienna, Budapest and Dornbirn, among others. He is the author of numerous texts on 20th century and contemporary art and has taught at the universities of Innsbruck and Graz.

Melissa Lumbroso (b. 1980 in Paris) is assistant curator at the Albertina in Vienna, where she has collaborated on several group exhibitions, e.g. Drawing Now: 2015, as well as on large-scale exhibitions dedicated to Keith Haring, Florentina Pakosta, Hermann Nitsch, Xenia Hausner, Ai Weiwei and Yoshitomo Nara. She established “Kunst@IHS” in 2017, a series of exhibitions with contemporary artists at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Vienna. Since 2020, Lumbroso has been developing an online catalogue raisonné with over 3,000 drawings and paintings by Florentina Pakosta with the launch planned for the fall of 2023.

The Dorotheum is the exclusive sponsor of the Secession Podcast.

Jingle: Hui Ye with an excerpt from Combat of dreams for string quartet and audio feed (2016, Christine Lavant Quartett) by Alexander J. Eberhard

Editing Director: Melissa Lumbroso, Florentina Pakosta & Jürgen Tabor
Editor: Paul Macheck

Programmed by the board of the Secession
Produced by Christian Lübbert