Maria Lassnig. Verschiedene Arten zu sein

Born in Krappfeld, Carinthia, in 1919, the artist is now world famous for her ruthless self-portraits with expressive colouring, which she uses to radically question her self. But for long decades her work aroused little attention – a fate she shares with many female artists. Not until she was sixty was this painter, graphic artist and media artist called to be Professor for Painting at the Academy for Applied Arts in Vienna. In 1980 she and Valie Export together took over the Austrian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. In 2002 she received the Roswitha Haftmann Prize, awarded in Zurich, which was the occasion for the exhibition of a selection of Lassnig’s self-portraits in the Kunsthaus. In 2013 finally, one year before her death, Lassnig was awarded the Golden Lion in Venice for her life’s work. The exhibition on the ground floor, showing 25 of the large-format self-portraits from the previous ten years, was set up by the guest curator Toni Stoss. Maria Lassnig described herself as follows: ‘I am a realist who is not satisfied with Realism.’ (1983, published in ‘Die Feder ist die Schwester des Pinsels’ (The Pen is the Brush’s Sister, 1997). And Toni Stoss wrote: ‘Apparently today again a realistic painter, who since the beginning of her artistic activity can hardly be captured with the categorizations applied to her art: ‘Realism’ and ‘Expressionism.’ As painter and graphic artist, Maria Lassnig worked from a decidedly feminist angle and put her bodily experience at the center (‘body sensation,’ ‘body consciousness’). In this way she has influenced generation of female artist, but also male artists. And the externalization of her inner sensitivity is still impressive today. In all cases, the response from the media was positive. ‘Dramatic and comical […] Worth seeing. Worth thinking about.’ This was the judgement of Siegmund Kopitzki (Südkurier), while Sabine Altdorfer praised Lassnig’s art as extremely variable, while regretting that Zurich had given the artist no retrospective: ‘The concept is convincing, the exhibition impressive, but really one would like to see more.’ (Aargauer Zeitung). The exhibition travelled to the Städel in Frankfurt. The exhibitions in Zurich and Frankfurt were accompanied by a publication, edited by Toni Stoss and the Roswitha Haftmann Foundation.