VIENNA.- Maria Lassnig (1919–2014) numbers among the most outstanding and important artists of the recent past. In the oeuvre that she built, Lassnig strove consistently to put her very own perception of her body and emotions to paper. The pictures she created revolve around deepreaching sentiments and sensations.

Three years after Maria Lassnig’s death, the Albertina is paying homage to Lassnig’s drawn work with a retrospective showing that brings together around 80 of the artist’s most evocative drawings and watercolors. In this presentation, heretofore entirely unknown works on paper reveal themselves to be key statements that, together with more familiar output, shed new light on her concept of “body awareness” and afford new insights into the Austrian artist’s diverse oeuvre.

Looking Inward
It was long before body consciousness and relations between women and men became central themes of the international avant-garde that Maria Lassnig made her own body the focus of her art. The central aim of her “body awareness paintings” was to visualise bodily emotions and explore bodily perception. In a way that was at once humorous and serious, and full of yearning yet merciless, the artist set out to put how she perceived herself to paper. It was thus what she felt, and not what she saw, that Lassnig visualised. “You paint the way you are,” said the artist, thus confirming the self-contradictory way in which she engaged in unconditional dialogue with both external and internal realities.

The insistent portraits that Lassnig created as a school student in Carinthia had already borne witness to her outstanding giftedness: her questioning gaze—acutely observant, mercilessly critical, and initially assisted by a mirror—conspicuously dominated her portraits of herself and would accompany her through all the decades of her work. The self-portrait was to remain the artist’s central theme, a genre with a long art-historical tradition to which she would lend entirely new dimensions.

It was early on, in the late 1940s, that Lassnig created her first “body awareness paintings”— which she initially termed “introspective experiences”. In this placement of the female body at the centre of her creative work, she foreshadowed any and all comparable stances in Europe and America far in advance. Her symbolic language and outlines not only defined the shapes of the depicted objects, but soon came to also convey tension in a highly potent, condensed manner.

Artist-as-Seismograph
The late 1960s saw Lassnig move to New York. The city’s pulsating art scene and the feminist stances and groups to be found there stimulated her to forge ahead along new paths: she attended an animation course, but instead of the day-job at Walt Disney Studios for which she had been aiming, this led to animated films in which she used “body awareness drawings” to process private life events, yearnings, and experiences. In 1980, following a subsequent stay in Berlin, the artist—by then 60 years old—accepted a professorship at Vienna’s Academy of Applied Arts in Theory of Design – Experimental Design with a focus on painting . After returning to Vienna to take up her post, Lassnig’s exploration of bodily sensation advanced to the neural pathways. Her depictions speak to a high degree of inner tension that allowed her to react like a seismograph. Numerous works make a theme of the frequently cruel treatment of animals and nature, depicting animals alone or together with human figures—which were often self-portraits. Here, the two levels of reality—that which is seen and that which is internally perceived—exist side by side.

An Uncompromising Mode of Work
“The drawing is closest to the idea,” said Lassnig. And it was in this spirit that her final years saw her create primarily pencil sketches. These represent something like a distilled essence of her creative output and at the same time touchingly document how she deliberately came to terms with her weakening body—in part manifested by her more filigree and tremulous strokes—in order to mercilessly and relentlessly lend expression to her feelings via the tip of her pencil.

In her art, Maria Lassnig remained free, innovative, visionary, and uncompromising to the very end. And today, her independent contribution, which bears within it her determination and pugnacity, her vulnerability, and her brutality and toughness towards herself, is finally beginning to gain broader recognition in an international context.