Maria Lassnig: The Perfect Painter
Maria Lassnig You or Me 2008 Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth Zürich London and Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York
Born in 1919, the Austrian painter Maria Lassnig cuts a surprising figure as a leading artist of the 21st century; but on the evidence of a survey exhibition of recent paintings at London’s Serpentine Gallery, the 89-year-old artist just gets stronger and stronger.
Lassnig has worked for more than 60 years in Paris, New York and Vienna. Considered a pioneer feminist (although not by herself) Lassnig was included in the 2007 touring survey Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution. In 1997 curator Catherine David made her a memorable central figure of Documenta 10. There, Lassnig showed a remarkable series of works featuring her own self-portrait, works in which her face melted like wax to take transformative identities. (She also showed in Documenta 7 in 1982.)
Lassnig terms her hybrid figurative/abstract portraits “body-awareness paintings” and their goal is to represent inner sensations. “I step in front of the canvas naked, as it were. I have no set purpose, plan, model or photography. I let things happen. But I do have a starting-point, which has come from my realization that the only true reality are my feelings, played out within the confines of my body. They are physiological sensations: a feeling of pressure when I sit or lie down, feelings of tension and senses of spatial extent. These things are quite hard to depict.”
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Maria Lassnig The Illegitimate Bride 2007 Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth Zürich London and Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York |
Hard to depict, indeed, but the bright fluidity of her painting style brings visceral urgency to her images. In the 2008 self-portrait You or Me framed by the entry to the Serpentine’s galleries, Lassnig shows herself sitting naked with a gun in one hand pointed at the viewer and a gun in the other hand pointed to her head. It’s the classic passive-aggressive cycle of the artist, balancing the possibilities of violence and self-destruction. But since when does the theme come outlined in lemon yellow, green and teal blue?
It is this optimistic colouring and buoyant brushwork that enriches Lassnig’s Sturm und Drang psychological themes. They lift the troubled, expressionist aspects of her subject matter into new territory, adding a dimension of play so that we recognize the images as a form of self-drama, not so much realities as subjective speculations on reality. In The Illegitimate Bride (2007) the white veil becomes an aura for the woman’s shadowed face and bright, pendulous breast. The scrubbed blue sky through the window harks back to renaissance portraiture and makes an exit from the incandescent light in the foreground. Sex and modesty, together with night and day, combine to make an ambiguous setting but the bride is shown in motion, capable of moving through all possibilities.
Spell, from 2005, makes a companion to the double gun portrait; only here the theme is art’s state of rapt attention rather than its ever-present anxieties about presentation. The figure could be archaic, a player in a Greek drama or one of Shakespeare’s witches. Her oblique gaze is aligned with a raised, spotlit hand. It’s the hand of the maker, the spell-caster, the artist. The painting calls up a moment of pause in a narrative line of drama and transformation. The quickness of the brush strokes seems part of an effort at capture; but those same marks of course return us from the image to the material facts of the painting. It is a beautiful, spirited picture unconcerned with aesthetics—only action. Did I mention that Maria Lassnig is 89? (Kensington Gardens, London UK)
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Maria Lassnig Spell 2005 Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth Zürich London and Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York |
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