Maria Lassnig

Biography

Maria Lassnig is considered to be the most significant contemporary Austrian painter. After her surrealist beginnings Lassnig co-founded Austrian “Informal Art" in the early fifties. Her works impress through their formal and substantive intensity as well as their persistent pursuit of a vision. Her “body awareness“ paintings have already made unique and significant contributions to 20th and 21st century art.

Maria Lassnig was born in the Carinthian town of Kappel am Krappfeld in 1919. Initially, she trained in Klagenfurt to become a primary school teacher and later studied painting at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts under Wilhelm Dachauer, Ferdinand Andri and Herbert Boeckl from 1941 to 1944. The artist’s first solo exhibition took place in 1948, and in the same year she drew her first “body awareness” drawing. The early fifties was a time of change, as Lassnig moved to Vienna and spent two stints in Paris, where she settled in 1961. During this period, the artist created her large format works, the so-called “body awareness” paintings. In 1968, she moved to New York. International recognition and acclaim enabled Lassnig to present her works at the Venice Biennale in 1980. In the same year, she accepted a position at the Vienna University of Applied Arts, becoming the first female professor of painting in a German-speaking country. In 1985, the first major retrospective exhibition of her work was shown in Vienna, Düsseldorf, Nuremberg, and Klagenfurt. In the last decade especially, she has been featured extensively at an impressive array of international exhibitions and received numerous awards -- a sign of great worldwide recognition of her oeuvre. The artist died 2014 in Vienna.