Maria Lassnig

Me, Encircled by a Fly

29 May 2019 - 31 December 2020

Online Exhibition

The work of Maria Lassnig, one of the most significant painters of the contemporary era, is marked by its unrelenting probing into themes of the body and its meaning. The online exhibition, ‘Maria Lassnig. Me, Encircled by a Fly’, is a special selection of the artist’s works on paper and canvases between 1987 and 2005. It explores this preoccupation with the physical presence of the body – a concept the artist coined as ‘body awareness’. ‘I searched for reality that was more fully in my possession than the exterior world’, Lassnig remarked. ‘I found it waiting for me in the body house in which I dwell, realest and clearest reality...’ Taking its title from an eponymous self-portrait painted in the 1990s, the presentation considers myriad interpretations of the physical that Lassnig depicted throughout her oeuvre.

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About the Artist

Maria Lassnig

Born in Carinthia in Southern Austria in 1919, Maria Lassnig’s (1919 – 2014) work is based on the observation of the physical presence of the body and what she termed ‘body awareness’, or ‘Körpergefühl’ in German. She studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna in the midst of...

Current Exhibitions