Maria Lassnig, Exhibition, Albertina, Vienna: 6 September-1 December 2019

Lassnig painted for decades before anyone paid serious attention to her. Gallerists and dealers returned her portfolio with messages that the work was "strange", "morbid" and even "sick".

Most of her work was unnerving self-portraits, which put  art put dealers and curators off. Commenting on her first retrospective in the UK aged 90, at the Serpentine Gallery in 2008, the Observer's art critic called Lassnig "the discovery of the century", adding "it would be hard to think of a greater artist of whom so little...is known".  In 2013 – a year before her death – Lassnig was awarded the Golden Lion lifetime achievement award at the Venice Biennale.

Lassnig turned her nose up at artists who based their portraits on photos, believing that the act of painting should be spontaneous and personal.  Lassnig called it "body-awareness painting" ie painting  an image that reflected her feelings  feeling at that moment. "The only true reality is my feelings, played out within the confines of my body," she said.

As you will see her bodis were often distorted and deformed. A good example of this was her 2005's You or Me, in which a naked 86-year-old Lassnig – full-frontal and saggy-breasted – glares out of the canvas, holding a  pistol to her head and pointing another at the viewer. 

Her self-portraits, in this respect, are very important because, through them, the artist inspects what she calls the “body awareness”. Attention for the physique intensified gradually during the 60s when Lassnig definitively left the abstract style to focus on the topic of the relationship between the body and the soul. During the two following decades, she continued to create a great number of self-portraits, pairing her own image with objects, animals and other people, in order to explore her inwardness.  

Maria Lassnig’s talent and fame were acknowledged only during the last stage of her life when she was recognised to be the first woman to be offered a chair at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna.

Albertina

Albertinaplatz 1, 1010 Vienna