Maria Lassnig

(Austria, 08/09/1919 - 06/05/2014)

Self-Portrait with Stick (1971)

Born in Kappel am Krappfeld, Austria, Lassnig devoted her work to portraying not what the body looked like on the outside, but what it felt like to exist inside a specific body at a specific time.

This concept of subjectivity, which she named ‘Körperbewusstseinsmalerei’ (‘body awareness painting’), enabled her to be one of the first artists of her generation to move beyond the dichotomy of abstraction and figuration, but made her work difficult to understand at the height of the avant-garde's rejection of content and narrative-based art.

After beginning her formal training at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna during World War II, Lassnig joined the artistic goop, Hundsgruppe (Dog Pack) where their abstract expressionism and action painting influences allowed her to combine abstraction and figuration in ways not seen before. Her first visit to Paris in 1951 further inspired her to incorporate infomalism and tachisme imagery into her work, making her one of the first to introduce the styles to post-war Austria.

In 1960, Lassnig moved to Paris, then to New York in 1968, and began looking to herself as her primary subject, using her works to unflinchingly record her physiological state. Often painting with her eyes closed, Lassnig was introspective and painted the body, often her own, only as she subjectively felt it at that given moment.

Of her artistic process, Lassnig has said: “I step in front of the canvas naked, as it were. I have no set purpose, plan, model or photography. I let things happen. But I do have a starting-point, which has come from my realization that the only true reality are my feelings, played out within the confines of my body. They are physiological sensations: a feeling of pressure when I sit or lie down, feelings of tension and senses of spatial extent. These things are quite hard to depict.”

Returning to Vienna in 1980, Lassnig became the first female professor of painting in a German-speaking country when she took a professorship position in painting and animation film at the University of Applied Arts, Vienna, where she was chair until 1997. In 1988, she was the first female artist to win the Grand Austrian State Prize and, in 2005, was awarded the Austrian Decoration for Science and Art. In 2013, the year before her death, her impact on post-war art was recognised when she was awarded Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 55th Venice Biennial.

Image: Maria Lassnig, Self-Portrait with Stick (1971). Oil and charcoal on canvas, 193 x 129 cm. Maria Lassnig Foundation.