For many decades, Florentina Pakosta has devoted herself to art against all resistance from the outside. To mark the occasion of her 85th birthday, the Albertina is devoting a large-scale retrospective to her oeuvre.

In the drawings and printed graphics produced at the outset of her creative career, Pakosta reacted to discrimination against women in the art scene. Another significant aspect of her work pertains to physiognomy and body language. And in her 1980s series Warenlandschaften und Menschenmassen (Product Landscapes and Crowds of People), Pakosta lent expression to the disappearance of the subject.

Later on, the artist once again turned to painting and has since been creating tricoloured images of bar-like shapes, an ongoing series of works derived from experienced emotion.