‘Maria Lassnig. A Painting Survey, 1950 – 2007’ will be on view through 31 December 2016. The exhibition has been organized by Peter Pakesch, Chairman of the Maria Lassnig Foundation, Vienna, and Paul Schimmel, Vice-President and Partner, Hauser Wirth & Schimmel. A major international retrospective of works by Lassnig is currently touring Tate Liverpool, Liverpool, England; Kunsten Museum of Modern Art Aalborg, Aalborg, Denmark; Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany; and the National Gallery, Prague, Czech Republic, through 2018. A 2017 retrospective of Lassnig’s works on paper will travel from the Albertina, Vienna, Austria to Kunstmuseum Basel, Basel, Switzerland.
‘Maria Lassnig. A Painting Survey, 1950 – 2007’ reveals the ways in which the artist drew from and challenged conventions of abstraction to create a singular figuration. Organized chronologically, the exhibition unfolds over five rooms, beginning with the early 1950s. In such rarely seen oil paintings as the 1953 works ‘Flächenteilung Schwarz-Weiß-Grau 2’ and ‘Flächenteilung Schwarz-Weiß-Grau 1,’ viewers can see Lassnig exploring an abstract visual language bolstered by her immersion in French avant-garde circles and her relationships with such writers such as Paul Celan, Friederike Mayröcker, and Oswald Wiener.
By the late 1950s and early 1960s, Lassnig’s work had turned to gestural, field-like abstract landscapes, exemplified by ‘Tachismus 4’ (1958/1959) and ‘Untitled’ (ca. 1960), in which her earlier subdued palette is replaced by intense, warm color. At the same time, an innovative figuration, expressive and painterly, is beginning to emerge. In such canvases as ‘Selbstporträt als Tier’ (1963) and ‘Balancing Myself’ (1965), Lassnig trains her eye upon herself, offering up works that are caricatured, allegorical, and psychologically penetrating. Her intense color palette in this period, with hot pinks and florid purples and reds, is deliberately unnatural, provoking a reevalutation of the figure-ground relationship.
In the 1970s, Lassnig turns to a subtler, cooler, but equally surreal palette to portray recognizable nude figures, including the two self-portraits on view ‘Dreifaches Selbstporträt/New Self’ (1972) and ‘Selbstportait mit Weinglas’ (1975). These depictions of solitude give way in the 1980s to figures barely recognizable as human, but whose raw vulnerability is instantly legible as Lassnig’s. By the end of the decade, the artist’s ongoing exploration of figure-ground tensions is expressed in such works as ‘Große Flächenteilung/Spiegel’ (1989) and ‘Unterbrechung’ (1989), in which simple shapes are painted over horizontal swaths of intense and even acrid contrasting color fields.
The last room of the exhibition presents works from 1990s and 2000s. Here Lassnig has moved from an agitated, intense palette to cool, vivid, and complementary hues. Fragmented figures in some works – ‘Generationsfußtritt/Generationsprobleme II’ (1998/99) and ‘Be-Ziehungen VI’ (1994), for example – seem to suggest the artist confronting questions of knowledge, language, and generational conflict. Other canvases on view, painted in this final period of Lassnig’s life, reflect tender and personal moments – a figure kissing a teddy bear, a self-portrait blowing a bubble.
