Maria Lassnig

Maria Lassnig (8 September 1919 – 6 May 2014) was an Austrian artist known for her painted self-portraits and her theory of "body awareness". In 1980, she became a professor for Painting at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, where she taught until her death. She was the first female artist to win the Grand Austrian State Prize in 1988 and was awarded the Austrian Decoration for Science and Art in 2005. Her mother gave birth to her out of wedlock and later married a much older man, but their relationship was troubled and Lassnig was raised mostly by her grandmother. She attended the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna during World War II.

Work Lassnig is credited with helping to introduce Informalism and Tachisme into postwar Austrian art. In the 1950s, Lassnig was part of the Hundsgruppe ("Dog Pack") group, which also included Arnulf Rainer, Ernst Fuchs, Anton Lehmden, Arik Brauer and Wolfgang Hollegha. The works of the group were influenced by abstract expressionism and action painting. In 1951 Lassnig traveled to Paris with Arnulf Rainer where they organized the exhibition Junge unifigurative Malerei at the Kärnten Art Association. In Paris she also met the surrealist artist André Breton and the poets Paul Celan and Benjamin Péret.

Though Lassnig began her career painting abstract works, she always created self-portraits. One of her earliest was Expressive Self-Portrait (1945), which she painted only weeks after leaving Vienna. In 1948 Lassnig coined the term "body consciousness" (Körpergefühlmalerei in her native German) to describe her practice. For example, red often acts as the most significant color in her paintings, sometimes suggesting pain but often just intense feeling or strain. By the 1960s Lassnig turned away from abstract painting altogether and began to focus more wholly on the human body and psyche. Since that time she created hundreds of self-portraits.

From 1968 to 1980, Lassnig lived in New York City. From 1970 to 1972 she studied animated film at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. During this time she made six short films, including Selfportrait (1971) and Couples (1972). Her most famous film, however, Kantate (also known as The Ballad of Maria Lassnig), was produced in 1992 when she was seventy-three years old. Kantate (1992) depicts a filmic self-portrait of the artist set to songs and music. She was a chair at the University until 1997.

In 2013 Lassnig received the Golden Lion Award for lifetime achievement at the 55th Venice Biennale. Her work was included in the 2024 exhibition Making Their Mark: Works from the Shah Garg Collection at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA).

Gallery

Exhibitions Well into her sixties and late in her career, Lassnig began to receive widespread recognition, especially in Europe. In 1996 a retrospective of her work was held at the Centre Georges Pompidou. which also travelled to the Contemporary Arts Center in the Lois & Richard Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati (2009). The exhibition was curated by Julia Peyton-Jones and Hans Ulrich Obrist in association with Rebecca Morrill and featured thirty canvases and seven films.

Lassnig's later solo exhibitions included It's art that keeps one ever young, Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich, Germany (2010), 'Maria Lassnig. Films’, Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York NY, (2011), and The Location of Pictures, Universalmuseum Joanneum; Graz (2012). as well as Deichtorhallen; Hamburg (2013).

MoMA PS1 held a major exhibition in 2014 of works, many of which that had not previously been seen in the United States before including 50 paintings, filmic works and a selection of watercolors. They have continued to show her films, as in the 2018 exhibition Maria Lassnig: New York Films 1970-1980.

Since 2014, the year of her death, her work was shown at the Fondacio Tapies in Barcelona (2015), Tate Liverpool (2016), the Albertina, Vienna (2017), and the Zachęta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw (2017), the National Gallery in Prague (2018), Kunstmuseum Basel (2018), and Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (2019). Lassnig's work was included in the 2022 exhibition Women Painting Women at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.

From October 15, 2022–April 2, 2023, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston exhibited Body Awareness: Maria Lassnig’s Experimental Films that “16 pieces that explore physical sensation, autobiography, friendship, and New York City, where the artist lived in the 1970s.”

Collections Lassnig's work is held in the following permanent collections: Museum of Modern Art, New York Albertina, Vienna

Legacy Critics have pointed to the influence that Lassnig's work had on contemporary artists like Nicole Eisenman, Dana Schutz, Thomas Schütte, and Amy Sillman.

Recognition Creative Artists Public Service Program Fellowship in the field of film of The New York City Council on the Arts (1973/1974)

Grand Austrian State Prize for Visual Arts (1988) Honorary doctor, University of Klagenfurt (1999 / 2013) Roswitha Haftmann Prize (2002) Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement (with Marisa Merz) at the 55th Venice Biennial (2013)

Sleeping with a Tiger biopic A biopic on her life was made by Anja Salomonowitz in 2024. Titled as Sleeping with a Tiger, the film was screened in February 2024, as part of the 74th Berlin International Film Festival, in Forum.