Maria Lassnig
About the exhibition
Maria Lassnig (1919–2014) is a leading name in international post-war and contemporary art. Her artistic development was deeply influenced by the two decades which she spent outside her homeland Austria. After living in Paris for eight years, she moved to New York in 1968, eventually arriving in West Berlin in 1978 on a DAAD scholarship.
The Berlinische Galerie will present a comprehensive exhibition of her life and work which, for the first time, will examine in detail how her practice was influenced by Paris, New York and Berlin. In all these settings her signature concept of body awareness, with which she translated physical sensations into images, remained an underlying strand. At the same time, she took an interest in the artistic discourse of her day and continually renewed her style. In Paris she made her first large-scale body awareness paintings, Strichbilder (“Fine Line Pictures”); later in New York she added (animated) film as an entirely new medium. In Berlin, where Lassnig was in dialogue with the writer Oswald Wiener, she produced in-depth perception studies.
The exhibition, featuring large-scale paintings, drawings, watercolours and (animated) films from international collections, is the result of close collaboration with the Maria Lassnig Stiftung and the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris.
