Maria Lassnig

Over the course of her remarkable career, she created a substantial body of work in the fields of painting and graphics alongside her excursions into (animated) film and sculpture. Lassnig conducted a focused dialogue with her art, which always constituted the pivotal strand of her life.

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. Since Lassnig has left her mark on a number of artistic developments, she is regarded as one of the founders of art informel in Austria and as a pioneer of female emancipation in a world of art dominated by men. Her visionary work has had a great influence on subsequent generations of artists.

(c)Maria Lassnig Foundation