Keywords:
Body awareness
Use body as a way of seeing
Self-portrait
Maria Lassnig was at different times both figurative and linear, realist and allusive, full and spare. The only thing that stayed the same was her subject matter, which was always herself. She was by turns baby, cheese grater, dumpling, robot, monster, lemon and elderly naked gunslinger. Her approach is based on what she called "body awareness." Instead of painting what she sees objectively, the artist depicts what she feels, subjectively, representing only those portions of her body that she senses at any given moment. She uses her own body as a medium to transform figures into expressions of the artist's physical sensations.
'All my realistic pictures, in which my self-portraits are represented, as seen from outside, and their addition of animals and objects, have erroneously been regarded as BA pictures = body awareness pictures. But when a realistic body object or some other object is inserted or added to a BA picture, it's a juxtaposition of the externally
perceived world and physically felt word.' ( Maria Lassnig 1992)
Lassnig was not given to self-indulgence. She restricted herself to depicting only those parts of herself that she could physically feel. The result was a body on the canvas that often looks partial, even deformed. In a Lassnig painting, limbs are regularly abbreviated into vestigial knobs, a torso is detached, an ear ends up on a dinner plate. The stark white backgrounds, meanwhile, refuse to provide any clues as to how to read these absences and displacements.
‘Being so sensitive to sounds and smells, and also to sitting and lying down, interfered with meditation and became an inspiration to do research. This led to a certain tendency to want the impossible, to go beyond skill, beyond the security of the real, into uncharted territory—a physical feeling that is difficult to define visually, where does it begin, where does it end, what shape is it, pointed, curved, zigzag.' (Maria lassnig 1985)
Books and other resources
Maria Lassnig, 1992. Zeichungen und Aquarelle. Vienna: Galerie Ulysses.
Fundació Antoni Tapies, 2015. Maria Lassnig Works, Diaries&Writings. Berlin: Pau Dito Tubau
Catelogue of the Museum Moderner Kunst/Museum des 20. Jahrhunderts, Vienna, 1985
