Maria Lassnig: body-awareness paintings

Spell 2006
Maria Lassnig
Oil on canvas



I had no clue who Maria Lassnig was until a day before yesterday, when her name came up during a discussion with a friend and an Internet search on feminism and art. What I found left me unnerved and awed. For Maria Lassnig’s art is indeed unnerving, confusing and awe-inspiring at the same time.

Lassnig is a painter with a strong feminist viewpoint. And her paintings, like many feminist works of art, are not always pretty to look at. Her abstractions challenged my mind and left me clueless on most occasions. To be honest, I found some of them grotesque. But then, mine is an uncultured mind.

Further search led me to more information about Lassnig, and what impressed me was the fact that although she is now almost 90 years old, she still manages to exhibit her work in exhibitions around the world – like the one currently on at the Serpentine Gallery in London.

According to the Serpentine Gallery website on Maria Lassnig’s exhibition:

“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.”

As I found out, this is just the introduction to Maria Lassnig’s art. There’s more, lot’s more. Like the moving 24 April 2008 article on Lassnig’s Serpentine Gallery exhibition in The Guardian by Adrian Searle. Or, the straight-talking review by Laurie Attias in Frieze Magazine from May 1996 on Lassnig’s exhibition in Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. Or, the Jörg Heiser interview of Lassnig in the November-December 2006 issue of Frieze Magazine.

Slowly, Maria Lassnig’s thoughts and world of body-awareness paintings opened up before me, swallowing me in its bold, unnerving, confusing and awe-inspiring beauty.

Some of Maria Lassnig’s art can be found in Adrian Searle’s article link in The Guardian and at the Friedrich Petzel Gallery.

[Citation: Serpentine Gallery; Friedrich Petzel Gallery; Adrian Searle’s article in The Guardian, April 2008; Laurie Attias’ review in Frieze Magazine, May 1996; Jörg Heiser’s interview in Frieze Magazine, November-December 2006 issue.]

NOTE: It seems the Friedrich Petzel Gallery link has been withdrawn. Please try the Art Moco link instead to see a few samples of Maria Lassnig's work.