On February 28, the 10th anniversary of the artist’s death, a new exhibition – “Maria Lassnig: Drawings and Paintings” – opened at Ljubljana Cankarjev dom. Lassnig’s first solo exhibition in Slovenia “traces her career from the 1940s to 2010s,” and includes drawings, oil paintings, and short animated films.
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“Lassnig wanted to visually express physical perceptions that, for her, could dissolve the boundaries between inside and outside. The idea was to paint not what she saw, but what she felt.”
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Background
Lassnig is one of “Austria’s most important and internationally renowned artists”. She lived and taught in Vienna from 1980 until her death in 2014, and became a professor at the Vienna University of Applied Arts. She was the “first female professor of painting in a German-speaking country“. Some have labeled her as “one of the most radical women artists of our time“.
Throughout Lassnig’s career, she produced a “prolific body of paintings and drawings, and also pursued animated film”. She’s known for the “depth of psychological expression in her self-portraits and her concept of body awareness”. Lassnig lived in Vienna, Paris, New York, and Berlin. Each city influenced her work.
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Maria Lassnig “engaged in a focused dialogue with her art, which always constituted the pivotal strand of her life”.
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Recognition
Lassnig’s work gained public recognition at a “relatively late stage in her life“. Today, “her works form an important part of the permanent collections of major museums worldwide” – MoMA New York City, Essl Contemporary Art Collection Klosterneuberg Austria, Ludwig Museum Cologne Germany, Albertina Museum Vienna, Uffizi Gallery Florence, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, etc. She helped “introduce Informalism into postwar Austrian art”.
As reflected in Maria Lassnig’s work, the period following World War II “represents a unique historical situation” that helped create a “radically new avant-garde art movement“. Even today, the post-war atmosphere in Eastern and Central Europe is almost palpable. It keeps calling me back to explore this fascinating part of the world.
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“The visitor is warned: the works in Maria Lassnig’s retrospective will not shy from brutal truths.” Maria Lassnig’s Ways of Being – Medium
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“Artists of Informalism questioned the entire, long-established process of painting – from image content to materials. They advocated for a liberated act of painting that would directly and authentically express the artist’s inspiration and emotions.” Informalism: Freedom for Painting! Kunsthaus ARTES
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