Maria Lassnig

By Carrie Moyer 1/1/09

Maria Lassnig has spent the past 60 years making paintings that show us exactly how she feels in her own skin. In what she calls her “Körperbilder” or “body awareness paintings,” Lassnig depicts only the parts of her body that she can actually sense while working. If she doesn’t feel the top of her head (and the evidence suggests she often does not), it is completely absent from her self-portrait. Even arms go missing—oddly enough for a painter at work—and are replaced by vestigial knobs that sprout from the torso. While it is reasonable to expect that her lifelong insistence on this strategy would have eventually led to a rather homogeneous output, in fact the opposite is true. From her earliest abstract drawings to symbolic self-portraits of the 1980s to the mostly representational images of the past decade, Lassnig’s oeuvre is formally and conceptually diverse precisely because she insists on her physical body as primary source. This position has given her license to freely hybridize figuration with abstraction as a means toward full sensory and psychological expression, and has engendered some of the most darkly perceptive imagery of the past century.

View Slideshow Madonna of the Pastries, 2001, oil on canvas, 59 by 783⁄4 inches.; 3 Ways of Being, 2004, oil on canvas, 491⁄2 by 803⁄4 inches.;

“Maria Lassnig,” currently at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, is the first American museum solo show for the prolific 89-year-old artist. Although she has exhibited widely in Europe since the late 1940s, Lassnig’s work has not been seen frequently in the U.S. The exhibition, which was organized by the Serpentine Gallery in London and curated by Julia Peyton-Jones and Hans Ulrich Obrist in association with Rebecca Morrill, features almost 30 canvases, most of them, remarkably enough, completed between 2001 and 2007. The exhibition also includes all seven of the artist’s films, dating from 1971 to 1992. At the CAC, Lassnig’s paintings are a revelation—vivid, ungainly works that fairly rupture the austerity and compression of the Zaha Hadid-designed galleries. Director and chief curator Raphaela Platow has spent many years studying Lassnig; her deep empathy and knowledge are evident in the witty and nuanced installation.

Lassnig splits her time between Vienna and Carinthia, in southern Austria, where she was born in 1919. In a videotaped interview conducted by Obrist for the exhibition, Lassnig explains that the only artworks she knew before arriving at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna in 1941 were “paintings of peasants” sanctioned by the Nazis. She traveled for the first time to Paris in 1951, on a scholarship. There she met the Surrealists André Breton and Benjamin Peret, and became friends with the poet Paul Celan. Her early encounters with Surrealism, Art Informel and Gutai left still-discernible influences in her work as well as her thinking. Approaching 50, Lassnig moved in 1968 to New York City, where she lived for a decade and produced six of her films (very little else is known about her time there). She was invited to return to Vienna in 1980 as chair of the Academy of Applied Arts—and was the first female professor of painting at a German-speaking university.

Although nearly 20 years older than many of the Viennese Actionists, Lassnig seems to have shared their proclivity toward a morbid self-scrutiny. Austrian artists during the 1960s, like their American counterparts, rejected the commodity-based art economy of the past, creating happenings and performances as a means of waking up a somnambulant postwar society. Hermann Nitsch and Otto Mühl staged orgiastic theatrical events involving quasi-religious rituals and mock (and some real) violence. Rudolf Schwarzkogler and Günther Brus went even further, performing painful acts of self-mutilation in front of the camera. While more private and less histrionic than her compatriots, Lassnig shares the Actionists’ interest in how repressive forces affect the corporeality of the artist. Within this context, “body awareness painting” might be construed as a kind of performance on canvas. In addition, like the American artist Lee Lozano, Lassnig seems to have spent much of her career groping for tangible images—both representational and abstract—to convey the experience of being an ambitious woman artist caught between outdated societal mores and the mirage of liberation.

It’s not surprising, then, that self-portraiture, Lassnig’s genre of choice, is where the artist is at her most ruthless and most humorous. You or Me (2005) features a naked old woman (Lassnig) sitting alone in a white, blank ground. Her eyes are wide open, and her legs are spread, exposing her bald pudendum. Quick scratches of bright blue and green demarcate the edge of her fleshy body. With one hand, she points a gun directly at the viewer; with the other, she holds a second gun to her own head. From across a long gallery at the CAC, this murderous crone stares (and aims) at her bewildered doppelgänger, the self-portrait in Language Grid (1999). Here, raw red and pink strokes cut across a face that has been stripped of its skin. Resting on a rough scaffold instead of a body, the artist’s colossal head looks like that of some futuristic sphinx.