“I am living in a skyscraper for the first time, I’ve always wanted to, on the 13th floor, that’s fairly high up. The view is fairytale-like. I look over to the right at the Empire State Building in the evening, with its three upper floors emitting orange, blue, and white light; the Edison with its Gothic window tower and all of the neighboring towers of light; on the left, the two lights of the tallest building in the world, the World Trade Center. The skyscrapers of the Wall Street area and below me, the roofs of East Village. These New York silhouettes form the foreground for a glowing red ball of a sun being immersed in the blue-green evening sky, a sky strewn with innumerable neon slogans that offer a different spectacle on the 4th of July, the fireworks that shoot into the air at different points in Manhattan.” 1979.

Maria Lassnig was born in Kappel am Krappfeld, Austria on 8 September 1919.  Her mother gave birth to her out of wedlock and later married a much older man, but their relationship was troubled and Lassnig was raised mostly by her grandmother.  She attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna during World War II.

In the 1950s, Lassnig was part of the Hundsgruppe (“Dog Pack”) group, which also included Arnulf Rainer, Ernst Fuchs, Anton Lehmden, Arik Brauer and Wolfgang Hollegha. The works of the group were influenced by abstract expressionism and action painting.  In 1951 Lassnig traveled to Paris with Arnulf Rainer where they organized the exhibition Junge unifigurative Malerei at the Kärnten Art Association.  In Paris she also met the surrealist artist André Breton and the poets Paul Celan and Benjamin Péret.

Though Lassnig began her career painting abstract works, she always created self-portraits. One of her earliest was Expressive Self-Portrait (1945), which she painted only weeks after leaving Vienna.  In 1948 Lassnig coined the term “body consciousness” (Körpergefühlmalerei in her native German) to describe her practice.  In this style, Lassnig only depicted the parts of her body that she actually felt as she worked.  As such, many of her self-portraits depict figures that are missing body parts or use unnatural colours. The shading of the grotesque forms then become a code for interpreting her “Körpergefühlmalerei.”

For example, red often acts as the most significant color in her paintings, sometimes suggesting pain but often just intense feeling or strain.  By the 1960s Lassnig turned away from abstract painting altogether and began to focus more wholly on the human body and psyche. Since that time she created hundreds of self-portraits.  Most of her work in the 1970s and 1980s paired her own image with objects, animals or other people, frequently with a blocked out or averted gaze, suggesting interiority.

From 1968 to 1980, Lassnig lived in New York City.  From 1970 to 1972 she studied animated film at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.  During this time she made six short films, including Selfportrait (1971) and Couples (1972).  Her most famous film, however, Kantate (also known as The Ballad of Maria Lassnig), was produced in 1992 when she was seventy-three years old. Kantate (1992) depicts a filmic self-portrait of the artist set to songs and music.

In 1980, she returned to become a professor at the Vienna University of Applied Arts, becoming the first female professor of painting in a German-speaking country.  She was a chair at the University until 1997.  In 1997 she also published a book of her drawings entitled Die Feder ist die Schwester des Pinsels (or The Pen is the Sister of the Paintbrush).  She continued to paint, and in 2008 made her provocative self-portrait, You or Me, which exemplifies the often confrontational nature of her works.

In 2013 Lassnig received the Golden Lion Award for lifetime achievement at the 55th Venice Biennale.

(Source: Wikipedia)

When the Austrian painter Maria Lassnig was forty-nine, she was living in Paris, successful enough but feeling stifled by her mansplaining peers. It was 1968, and the art world’s epicenter had long since shifted from Europe to the U.S.—“the country of strong women,” in Lassnig’s words. For the next twelve years, she lived in New York City, thriving in obscurity. It’s not that the artist had renounced her career but, rather, that American dealers had little interest in the daring approach to figuration she called “body awareness,” which relied on senses other than sight. Major acclaim came late to Lassnig, as it too often does for women artists of her generation; she died shortly after the opening of her first U.S. museum retrospective, in 2014, at the age of ninety-four, and her reputation has only grown since. The Petzel gallery’s charming online-only presentation “Maria Lassnig: Ode to New York” (at petzel.com) feels less like an exhibition and more like a scrapbook, a peek into the artist’s private reveries (a detail of a breezy watercolor, from 1979, is pictured here) in a city in which anonymity can be freedom.— Andrea K. Scott

The Austrian painter, who died in 2014 at the age of ninety-four, countered the familiar image of the artist in his studio with exhilarating, hallucinatory representations of the artist in her own skin. While the technique she dubbed “body awareness”—the translation of physical sensations into radically dysmorphic imagery—lends her self-portraits a dark lyricism, her palette is generally bright. A turquoise background sets off the startling “Selbstportraet mit Silvia/Silvia Goldsmith und Ich,” from 1972-73, in which Lassnig renders her friend with cheerful realism, while presenting herself topless and slack-faced, with rosy rectangles stuck to her cheeks. This wonderful show of works made between 1968 and 1980, when Lassnig lived in New York, also includes lovely watercolor cityscapes, tough pencil drawings, and ephemera documenting her alliance with a feminist collective as she translated her fluid expressionism and wicked humor to filmmaking.— The New Yorker

ODE TO NEW YORK: DRAWINGS 1968–1980

In scenes captured by Lassnig from the parks, rooftops, and windows of 1970s New York, we observe an artist as she revels in the liberation of a new, American landscape. From cityscapes to skylines, abstracted self-portraits, and moments in the famed Chelsea Hotel, Lassnig chronicles both herself and her surroundings in a sweeping ode to New York.

Lassnig’s self-reflective pencil drawings from this period exemplify how she also turned toward realism identified with portraiture. These drawings reflect how the artistic freedom Lassnig enjoyed in the City allowed her to experiment in other art forms, including film. She even went on to study animated film at the School of Visual Arts for one semester in the spring of 1971, and in 1974 she co-founded the Women/Artist/Filmmakers, Inc., a group of feminist filmmakers.

In 1968, at the age of 49, Lassnig moved from her home in Paris to New York City, to be in, as she called it, “the country of strong women.” Although well-known in her native Austria, Lassnig was virtually unheard of in the United States and lived, for the next 12 years, in relative anonymity, renting walk-up apartments on the Lower East Side and Soho.

According to those who knew her, she felt an affinity with the City; loved its constant activity, dynamism and the sense of freedom it engendered. New York City offered Lassnig a liberation of sorts from the male-dominated art scene of Europe. 

It gave her the opportunity to be an artist, not simply a female artist—and she worked prolifically, producing paintings, drawings, watercolors, silkscreen prints and animated films, often including hints of Americana in her work.

Lassnig’s New York years were an incredibly formative time for the artist, a period in which she further developed her singular “body sensation” or “body awareness” aesthetic of the late 1940s – using sensations of the body as conduits to envision the external world.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4sDSZ9GwnCE