Maria Lassnig

About

The majority of these are not generated from carefully observing the mirror image or from self-images in the imagination and from memory, but – and this is precisely where they gain their singularity – from bodily sensations. Maria Lassnig traces her physical experience and translates the awareness of her own body into images. “With these bodily sensation images, I have to fight against memory images from the start. I erase - not to speak of the mirror - the memory image as an obstacle. So that one perceives a completely pure body feeling, one has to switch off the memory.” (Maria Lassnig) The palette also follows the reality of perception – they are colors of meaning: “The decision for the color is made in the same way as for the form: arbitrarily. But that doesn't mean 'don't care', it's my will, I fight for it. It is not dependent on something that is already there. It is my decision. (...) The forehead gets a color of thought, the nose a color of smell, arms and legs color of flesh cover; There are colors of pain and torment, printing and solid colors, stretch and press colors, cavity and arching colors, squeeze and burn colors, death and decay colors, colors of fear of cancer – all of these are colors of reality.” (Maria Lassnig) “The decision for the color is made just like the decision for the form: random. But that doesn't mean 'don't care', it's my will, I fight for it. It is not dependent on something that is already there. It is my decision. (...) The forehead gets a color of thought, the nose a color of smell, arms and legs color of flesh cover; There are colors of pain and torment, printing and solid colors, stretch and press colors, cavity and arching colors, squeeze and burn colors, death and decay colors, colors of fear of cancer – all of these are colors of reality.” (Maria Lassnig) “The decision for the color is made just like the decision for the form: random. But that doesn't mean 'don't care', it's my will, I fight for it. It is not dependent on something that is already there. It is my decision. (...) The forehead gets a color of thought, the nose a color of smell, arms and legs color of flesh cover; There are colors of pain and torment, printing and solid colors, stretch and press colors, cavity and arching colors, squeeze and burn colors, death and decay colors, colors of fear of cancer – all of these are colors of reality.” (Maria Lassnig) flesh-colored arms and legs; There are colors of pain and torment, printing and solid colors, stretch and press colors, cavity and arching colors, squeeze and burn colors, death and decay colors, colors of fear of cancer – all of these are colors of reality.” (Maria Lassnig) flesh-colored arms and legs; There are colors of pain and torment, printing and solid colors, stretch and press colors, cavity and arching colors, squeeze and burn colors, death and decay colors, colors of fear of cancer – all of these are colors of reality.” (Maria Lassnig)
The paintings in the exhibition, the armchair self-portraits and what she calls the monster pictures, from the 1960s, which were so decisive for her development, make this immediately clear.

The works on paper presented – drawings, watercolours, graphics – are from the 1970s to 1990s. Technically very diverse, the focus here is also on the self-portrait, alongside impressions from the New York period (1968–1979), travel experiences and much more. The bronze sculpture of the sex goddess (1979) represents a less well-known aspect of Maria Lassnig's work.

In 1978/79 she made a DAAD possiblescholarship for a one-year stay in Berlin, which she uses especially for studies of perception. Maria Lassnig first gained international recognition with the renewed interest in figurative painting in the 1980s: in 1980 she and Valie Export exhibited in the Austrian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, in 1982 she took part in documenta 7, and in 2013 she was honored for her life's work awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale.

The exhibits come from the much more extensive inventory of Lassnig works in the Klewan Collection. In 1981, the art collector Helmut Klewan presented the first Lassnig exhibition in what was then his Munich gallery. «Thirty years of friendship with Maria Lassnig were like a struggle. You had to talk her out of every picture. She gave me oil paintings on commission rather than selling them. The knowledge of not getting a picture back was unbearable for her. Luckily she turned almost 95 and still lived to see her world fame.” (Helmut Klewan)