Maria Lassnig, 3 ways of being (3 Arten zu Sein), 2004, Öl auf Leinwand/Oil on canvas, 126 x 205 cm, Hauser & Wirth Galerie Zürich, © Maria Lassnig.

Maria Lassnig, Selbstportrait mit Meerschweinchen, 2000-2001, Öl auf Leinwant/Oil on canvas, Courtesy of the artist, © Maria Lassnig.

Maria Lassnig, Abraham sacrifices his son, 2007, Öl aug Leinwand/Oil on canvas, 200 x 150 cm, Courtesy of the artist, © Maria Lassnig.

MUMOK
Museum
Moderner Kunst
Stiftung Ludwig Vienna
MuseumsQuartier
Museumsplatz 1
+43-1-525 00
Vienna
Maria Lassnig
The Ninth Decade
February 13-May 17, 2009

Maria Lassnig is among the most important artists living today. A solo exhibition at the MUMOK celebrating her 90th birthday concentrates on works made during the past 10 years. All of the more than 60 paintings testify to the sensitivity and diversity of her late work full of life and radiant colors. Recent large-format paintings are shown for the first time within her show at MUMOK.

Over the course of her long career, Lassnig has been an important example for many artists, influencing an entire generation of painters. One of the most important aspects of her work throughout her sixty-year career has been to explore the way the body’s sensations are reflected in the medium of painting: “One thing is certain. I don’t paint or draw the body as an ‘object’ but rather the sensations of the body.” (Maria Lassnig, 1999) And she never shied away from expressing her feelings. Whether her strengths or weaknesses — whatever she discovered on her inner journeys was integrated into her paintings.

Maria Lassnig, who likes to cultivate the aura of a loner and has said about herself, “Sometimes I wish that I were a little less nice”, has continued to develop her work over many decades. She has consistently made relevant work in dramatically different societal and historical contexts, often been one of the reasons why her work has always been difficult to classify. Any specific stylistic trend in her work has only been valid as long as it did not get in the way of new experiences.

Her most recent paintings are especially convincing in their independence, striking colors, passionate and often elusive chromatic combinations. Here memory has played an important role as Lassnig stressed in an interview in Artforum: “Memory has become more important to me over the past few years. The outside world impinges on us so much today that it has become almost impossible to depict anything else.”

The exhibition concentrates on the “ninth decade” of Maria Lassnig’s work, showing how it has developed with respect to earlier works, without at the same time becoming redundant. Not without a certain share of irony, she has interpreted themes that she had already worked through before. Once again, there are mystical elements in her work, like for example in the so-called “Kellerbilder” that were made in her basement in Carinthia during a particularly hot summer. She asked some of her younger neighbors to pose for her, giving them some plastic wrap to hold in front of their faces. Here she was making a reference to memories she had of fruit packed in cellophane wrap, which she long ago saw for the first time in a supermarket in New York. During the early 1970s, she had painted a still life with apples and likewise a self-portrait with cellophane wrap. In addition, there are numerous self-portraits with animals along with a series of pictures of memories that go all the way back to her time at the art academy. With nude models she staged a short Adam and Eve series. Recent works have tended towards a new freedom of method, combining characteristic broad strokes with more naturalistic painting techniques.

The Ninth Decade represents the third large-scale “solo show” by Maria Lassnig with the previous exhibitions in 1985 and 1999 having been conceived more as classical retrospectives.

Maria Lassnig was born in 1919 in Kappel am Krappfeld, Carinthia. She began studies with Wilhelm Dachauer at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in 1941, but she was forced to leave in 1943 because her works were classified as “degenerate”. She then continued her studies with Ferdinand Andri and Hebert Boeckl. During the 1950s and 1960s, she spent many years in Paris, coming into contact with surrealism and other contemporary art movements such as American and French art informel. The first body-oriented watercolors are made at this time. From 1968 to 1980, Maria Lassnig lived in New York where she took part in a class at the School of Visual Arts on animated film after which she began making her own films. In 1980, she returned to Austria and became a professor of painting at the Academy of Applied Arts Vienna, the first woman to do so in any German-speaking country. Her work gained increasing recognition as she along with Valie Export represented Austria in 1982 at the 39th Venice Biennale and took part in the documenta 7.

In recognition of her life-long contribution to art, she has already received many important awards, including the Grand Austrian State Prize (the first woman to be awarded it in 1988), the Oskar Kokoschka Prize (1988) and the Max Beckmann Prize of the City of Frankfurt (2004).

Maria Lassnig, The Dream Couple (Das Trumpaar), 2004, Oil on canvas, 150 x 200 cm, Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth Zurich London and Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York, © 2008 Maria Lassnig.

Maria Lassnig, Don Juan d'Austria, 2001, Oil on canvas, 200 x 150 cm, Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth Zurich London
and Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York, © 2008 Maria Lassnig.

Serpentine Gallery
Kensington Gardens
London
020 7402 6075
Maria Lassnig
April 25-June 8, 2008

Viennese painter Maria Lassnig (b.1919) has been producing work over a period of 60 years in Paris, New York and Vienna. She is an avant-garde pioneer with a feminist viewpoint, continuing to produce some of her best work. Lassnig's powerful, bold and introspective paintings investigate human emotions and bodily sensations.

The Serpentine exhibition, the first solo presentation of her work in a public gallery in the UK, will include the first ever showing of a selection of Lassnig’s sensational fresh and vibrant oil paintings from the last three years and rarely exhibited films.

Lassnig uses bold forms and strong colours to create portraits and semi-figurative abstractions, which reject the static tendencies of traditional portraiture. She coined the phrase ‘body-awareness paintings’ to describe a visual language that she invented and uses in her work to depict the invisible aspects of inner sensations where there is a continual resistance against the repetitive and static. She has repeatedly used her own body, in her view an inexhaustible subject, as a tacit source to explore human sensory experience.

Lassnig was born in Carinthia, Austria, in 1919, and trained in Vienna. She spent several years in Paris in the 1950s and 1960s where she was exposed to Abstract Expressionism and Surrealism. She lived in New York from 1968 to 1980, making films that used her "body-awareness" as a basis for her remarkably inventive and humorous narratives. On her return to Austria in 1980, she became the first female Professor of Painting in a German-speaking country at Vienna University of Applied Arts. Her work found a greater critical response when she represented Austria in the 39th Venice Biennale that year, and was featured in Documenta 7 in 1982.

Lassnig’s work was featured in the major touring survey Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2007, and has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions internationally, including Museum of Modern Art, Ludwig Foundation, Vienna, 1999; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 1995; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 1994; and Kunstmuseum Dusseldorf, 1985. The Serpentine Gallery exhibition is curated by Julia Peyton-Jones and Hans Ulrich Obrist in association with Rebecca Morrill.