Maria Lassnig - Buy or sell works
8 September 1919, Kappel am Krappfeld (Austria) - 6 May 2014, Vienna (Austria)
Maria Lassnig is one of Europe’s most significant female painters and is widely known for her 'body awareness paintings'. She and Arnulf Rainer are considered the founders of Austrian informal painting.
Maria Lassnig was born in 1919 an illegitimate child in the Carinthian municipality of Kappel am Krappfeld. She lived with her grandmother until age 6, when she moved with her family to Klagenfurt. Here she attended the Ursuline Convent School and graduated with honours in 1939. Even as a child, she displayed an unusual talent for drawing, and took drawing lessons from ages 6–10.
Upon leaving school, Lassnig completed a year’s training as a primary school teacher before teaching in a tiny Carinthian mountain school with only one class from 1940–1941. At the suggestion of a childhood friend, she then decided to pursue a career in the arts. Her portfolio tucked under her arm, she cycled to Vienna, where she enrolled in the Academy of Fine Arts. She first studied in Wilhelm Dachauer’s masterclass, and later under Ferdinand Andri and Herbert Boeckl.
She completed her training in 1945 and returned to Klagenfurt, where she opened her first studio in 1947. The location later become a popular meeting place for painters and poets. She held her first solo exhibition in 1948 at the Kleinmayr Gallery in Klagenfurt. It was also through this gallery that she met the painter Arnulf Rainer, who was ten years her junior and who became her lover. Lassnig moved to Vienna in 1951, where she met writers of the avant-garde Wiener Gruppe and others. She travelled to Paris on a scholarship, where she met André Breton, Paul Celan and Benjamin Péret. In Vienna, she was part of the circle around Otto Mauer at the Galerie nächst St. Stephan, which included Arnulf Rainer, Wolfgang Hollegha, Josef Mikl and Markus Prachensky.
She lived in Paris for most of the 1960s, where she painted her first 'body awareness paintings'. She painted what she felt, rather than what she saw. For the rest of her life Lassnig would work on many variations of these paintings which always depicted the exterior of her inner world. Even her famous animated film Kantate (1992) is autobiographical, and showcases the artist’s sense of humour.
She consistently used her painting as a means of working through the death of her mother in 1964.
In 1968 she moved her studio to New York where she attended a course on film animation at the School of Visual Arts in 1970. Lassnig did not return to Austria until 1980, when she became the first female professor at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. She worked in this capacity until 1997.
Lassnig’s works have been exhibited widely. She received the Max Beckmann Prize from the city of Frankfurt in 2004, and received the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in recognition of her life’s work in 2013.