MARIA LASSNIG. IN THE MIRROR OF POSSIBILITIES. Watercolours and Drawings from 1947 to the Present

MARIA LASSNIG (1919-)

There are not many twentieth-century artists who have managed to maintain an international reputation for decades on end—the Austrian artist Maria Lassnig (*1919) is one of them. She has painted and drawn for over sixty years, and the freshness and expressive power in particular of her late work is striking. She succeeds in capturing her emotions—sometimes seriously, sometimes humorously—on canvas and paper.

This volume addresses itself to her very personal and direct drawings and watercolors. Their spectrum ranges from Maria Lassnig’s informal drawings from the forties, her “body sensation drawings,” and her New York animated films to the more painterly forms in her watercolors from the eighties and nineties. The book’s main focus, however, is on the artist’s most recent works, in which she combines simple pencil drawings with loud, often lurid backgrounds in a baffling way. Today, just as it did sixty years ago, for Lassnig, paper serves as a corrective, as a mirror of her Self.

Edited by Julia Friedrich, foreword by Kasper König, texts by Elisabeth Bronfen, Julia Friedrich, Oswald Wiener

Exhibition schedule: Museum Ludwig, Cologne, March 14–June 14, 2009