Maria Lassnig, You Paint As You Are
'I step in front of the canvas naked, as it were. I have no set purpose, plan, model or photography. I let things happen. But I do have a starting-point, which has come from my realisation that the only true reality are my feelings, played out within the confines of my body.'-Maria Lassnig
We are delighted to present You Paint As You Are, a solo booth of works by Austrian artist Maria Lassnig (1919-2014), on the occasion of the centenary of her birth. One of the most innovative painters of our time, Lassnig's work is based on an observation of the physical presence of the body. Through a selection of her important work made from 1987 to 2009, this solo presentation showcases how Lassnig maintained continuously new perspectives on major issues in the world. It coincides with a solo exhibition of works on paper by Lassnig at Hauser & Wirth Zurich, and the retrospective Maria Lassnig - Ways of Being at the Albertina Museum in Vienna.
Peter Pakesch, Chairman of the Maria Lassnig Foundation, elaborates on this important moment for the artist's body of work, and its significance in the world today:
The work of Maria Lassnig (1919-2014) spans seven decades ranging from twentieth-century modernism to the new millennium that is characterised by a flood of electronic images. Lassnig is increasingly recognised as an early prophet of this new era, and today we sense that it was because of her extraordinary vision that her work was not understood and appreciated until so late in her life. A number of retrospectives held in distinguished institutions around the world including MoMA PS1 in New York, Fundació Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona, Tate Liverpool, Museum Folkwang in Essen, the National Gallery in Prague, the Kunstmuseum Basel, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and the Albertina in Vienna have impressively focused on Lassnig's pioneering position.
It is therefore a delightful challenge and also a dilemma to present one of the greatest women painters of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in a concentrated show and to introduce her work to the market at large. This sort of presentation can be likened to entering a world of visual and physical perception. Lassnig's particular subject, and also her method, 'body awareness' with which she found a new way to investigate the sensations of our bodies. Paired with conceptional clarity and painterly virtuosity, she created a unique work based on research and negotiation of experience and sensibility. Lassnig countered introspection and self-reference with her uninhibited curiosity for the world, for topical issues, and for multifarious aspects of contemporary reality, not least of all the rapid developments in communications technologies. These are the key points that were considered for the selection of a small group of masterpieces.
The painting Tragisches Duett / Dramatisches Duett (Tragic Duet / Dramatic Duet; 1987), for example, engages Lassnig's concern with the body as well as general issues of painting and the positioning of painting in space, in both real and metaphorical terms. While the figure on the left actively reaches into space, the one on the right turns and withdraws in a nearly embryonic position. In Lassnig's oeuvre there are other works that show the same person, the artist herself, in two or more states-thus presenting 'various ways of being.' In the early 1960s, in a decisive step toward liberating her painting, Lassnig tried to come into closer contact with the canvas in order to actually experience it with her whole body. To this end she often lay directly on the picture to enable herself to interact even more directly with the support and the paint. Later she repeated this gesture in photo shoots and posed in this painting position.
The figures on the cloth in Tragisches Duett may represent an idyll, or they could bear witness to some sort of confrontation. The cloth could also be a canvas in a larger room, and the figures are the pictures or the subjects. The painting's second title, Dramatisches Duett, suggests that it is not an idyll, but that instead we are witnesses of a conflict. Is it a confrontation between two conditions, between two persons, or one with a greater entity-perhaps painting or even society? All of these things are possible, and are not contradictory, in Lassnig's work.
In Verspottung (Mockery; undated, ca. 1993-2009) the viewer is confronted with quite diverse patterns of the physical, ciphers for interaction, and derogatory gestures implying helplessness. The painter seems to have had the 'physicality' of animals in mind. There is reference to walking on all fours as well as the bearing of the buttocks that is typical of primates, indicating both a desire to mate and a display of disgust. Lassnig always enjoyed watching nature and wildlife shows on television, and images of animals showing a high degree of identification and respect are common in her work. It may be a highly emotional depiction of a brief moment, as in the present piece, but in Lassnig's work it can also take on a mythical dimension. However, the issues are always existential: animal behaviour and the presence of the animalistic refer to the human psyche and fluctuating conditions in dealing with them.
For example, Maria Lassnig transformed a conflict with her dealer into a sinister fable. Marienkäferchen und Spinne (Ladybug and Spider; 1987) tells of the differences she had with her former gallerist. The artist told the story as follows: 'The spider is my art dealer, Heike Curtze; the long neck; I am the ladybug.' The conflict is shifted to a fairy-tale situation that she remembers from childhood. Lassnig thus reflects not only on her relationship to the gallerist but also to all those, including curators and collectors, who desired pictures from her. All her life she had trouble giving up her 'children,' although simultaneously she wanted them to be seen and make her known. This led to a great contradiction that plagued her increasingly to the end of her life: she appreciated art dealers because they gave her the publicity and also the business she needed to survive, but they also stood for loss. Her uneasiness was increased and brought into focus in her dealings with dealers. For Lassnig, once a work was sold, it was also lost-literally out of sight. The artist experienced this situation as an existential drama, as a dilemma that she could not dispel.
When, on the other hand, she saw skiers on television, she was just as fascinated by their bodies in motion as by the mythology of the sport. There is no trace of a personal drama in 2 Figuren im Schnee (2 Figures in the Snow; undated, ca. 1995-2002). Instead she focuses on the figures that interact with the canvas. In this case the canvas is a snow-covered slope down which the skiers glide. Lassnig was always fascinated by the plethora of images she saw on television. Sport events were no exception, especially when they involved bodies that were engaged in extreme activities. This occupied Lassnig's mythical understanding that she often invested with irony. She transforms the 'dramatic duet' in the snow into a special act of movement. This is expressed in painterly abstraction, which-as is often the case in Lassnig's work-actually takes as its subject the relationship of the body to the canvas. By shifting the basic subject of her art to the 'unartistic' area of sport there is room for slapstick humour.
In the painting Motorrad im Wald (Motorcycle in the Forest; 1987) Lassnig depicts herself as an active, highly dynamic figure. She always spent her summers in the mountains of Austria. Her studio was located on a steep slope in an isolated forest. As transport she used a small motorcycle, even in advanced years. When she did this painting, she was nearly seventy years old, and she was to continue using her motorcycle for several more years. In conversation she often mentioned how fascinated she was with being united with her motorcycle. She also recounted how the trips she took on her small motorcycle, a well-known moped in Austria, gave her self-confidence and made her feel stronger as a result. Lassnig noted time and again the relationship between the mechanical and the physical. A passionate cineast, she also commented on the more hectic medium of film that was dependent on machines and the solitary act of painting: 'I was probably attracted by the contrast. When a painter makes films, it is like a Buddhist monk riding a motorcycle.' In the painting Lassnig's body merges with the motorcycle and moves through nature with monadic unity. Self-depictions showing this type of unity can often be observed in her work. Embryonic bodies that can transform themselves and progress through evolutionary stages are the subject of her paintings again and again.
The form that is seen in Blauer Weicher (The Blue Soft; 1998) can be read in many ways. The body, which is introduced in the title, can be recognised at first glance as a soft, blue, amorphous form. Upon second glance the body can be read as a torso. If you look even more carefully, you will see a schematic self-portrait in the centre. The artist can be understood, so to speak, as a being composed of a nose, mouth, and chin. The eyes are blocked out, as is often the case, and the upper part of the head is inflamed in red and crowned by a schematic cyclops eye, which is often included in Lassnig's works. If we then return to the way of viewing it as a torso, we realise that one of the limbs that are suggested is developing into a cylinder. From this sprouts a rod that points out of the painting. This body thus seems to be part of a machine.
Human being/machine is a recurring subject in Lassnig's oeuvre. It reflects the artist's interest in modern life, technical accomplishments, science fiction, and artificial intelligence. This tendency can be seen in an impressive yet covert manner in the paintings Elektrizität I (Electricity I; 1991), Lichtboot (Lightboat; 1993), and Drei Scheiben (Three Discs; 1991). As already observed in the picture Motorrad, the artist was able to imagine her body closely linked to the motorcycle. This sort of symbiotic constellation can often be found in her work.
At an early age Lassnig was inspired by the philosophical considerations of her friend, the great Austrian writer Oswald Wiener, and also by works of experimental architecture of the 1960s. Body and machine fragments, which can be found again in further abstracted form in the three above-mentioned works, are repeatedly fused in her iconography. The body also exists as an electrical socket that is cabled and electrified. Lassnig was interested in the physiology of nerves and signal networks in the body and brain. She was fascinated by electrical stimulation, also as a form of therapy. At documenta X (1997) she showed Gehirnzeichnungen (Brain Drawings). Previous to that, in 1994 in the catalogue of the exhibition in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, she was cited as having said, 'Every part of our body can be brought to life by awareness...At the same time, I am relieved that neurophysiology has not yet figured out all of the secrets of the nervous system.'
Lassnig's application of paint in all of the paintings should be noted, as it is one of the special qualities of her work. The colour combinations usually evoke intense emotional qualities that are decisively interlocked with moods as well as the understanding of the painting. Lassnig realised the significance of colour in her work very early in her development. She was particularly sensitive to colour, and she was able to use it perfectly to define space and forms-a high level of mastery in Western painting, as had come into effect in the play of colours used by the Impressionists. Lassnig went beyond this: her sensitivity to colours is related to synesthesia, the uncanny ability to link quite disparate perceptions. Lassnig perceived colours as feelings and found words for them from the vocabulary of emotions and poetry. She had a strong connection to poetry and the use of poetic language through her whole life. Her friendships to important poets such as Paul Celan and Friederike Mayröcker are legendary.
We can only guess who the object of the artist's lamentation is in the picture Trauer (Mourning; 2004). In a similar work from 2000, the otherworldly figure can be identified as the German painter Arnold Daidalos Wande (1924-1990), an early love of Lassnig's. In any case the work is about deep mourning that the paint directly conveys. On the left is a figure in the typical position, one of her many succinctly encrypted self-portraits. A wall, which can also be seen as a canvas or a painting, separates her from the dead person. It is possible that the separating element depicts a reflecting mirror. The intense red and green, violet and gray paint evoke despair and suffering, sadness and loss.
This small presentation of important works that is far from comprehensive conveys an idea of how Maria Lassnig saw major issues from constantly new perspectives and linked these to her own life: a groundbreaking effort that makes her one of the great masters of painting.