Artist and filmmaker

Maria Lassnig

Maria Lassnig (1919-2914) created a substancial body of work in the fields of painting and graphics alongside her excursions into (animated) film and sculpture. The key notion which came to characterise Lassnig's work was above all the concept of Körpergefühl or body awareness: by introspectively discovering the true nature of her own condition, she expressed physical sensations through the use of artistic media. Numerous self-portraits offer evidence of the form of self-analysis to which the highly sensitive artist constantly subjected herself.

She was a fellow of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program (BKP) in 1978. She stayed on in the city until 1980, when she was appointed professor at the Hochschule für Angewandte Kunst (University of Applied Arts) in Vienna at the age of sixty-one. While still a student at the Akademie der bildenden Künste (Academy of Fine Arts) in Vienna, she had been expelled from a painting class in 1944 because her self-portrait was not painted in natural colors, and her art was denigrated as “entartet” (degenerate).

In 1980 Maria Lassnig represented Austria at the Venice Biennale, together with Valie Export, and she also participated in documenta 7 and 10 (1982 and 1997).

© Maria Lassnig Foundation


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