Maria Lassnig was always 
searching for new experiences
in colors, in themes, in the 
expression of sensations.
She painted it for us
and she said ‘I’m painting 
not only for myself
I’m painting for the audience.
So people can learn 
something about reality
and not only about the
outside world reality
but also about the 
reality within.’
She was always very
strong-minded
she was completely 
devoted only to her work
and she had this
incredible visual curiosity.
I think what is really 
astonishing about
her whole career is 
how she started off.
Nobody would have ever
guessed that this child
could once become a 
cosmopolitan, avant-garde artist.
She was born in 1919 as
an illegitimate child
and the first six years she 
spent with her grandmother.
A certain kind of poverty in 
the very beginning of her life
had a big impact on her.
Her mother of course was
always very supportive
so Maria would get an art 
education from ten years on.
She finished school 
and became a schoolteacher
high up in the mountains
and then at 22 she decided
to become an artist 
and she took a bike and
drove from Carinthia 
in the mountains with
the bike to Vienna 
to the Art Academy.
Art at the academy at that 
time was very old-fashioned
there was no influence 
from international modern
contemporary art at all in the 
academies in the Nazi period.
Everything was forbidden. 
There was no Van Gogh
there was even no Cézanne
there was no surrealism, 
nothing at all.
It was just landscape 
painting and portraits
with dark brown colors.
What did she do? 
She painted with bright colors
and the professor said 
‘No you have to leave my class
because it’s too revolutionary.’
There is a certain tradition 
in Austria about colors
Kokoschka and 
Herbert Boeckl.
Boeckl was a teacher in Vienna 
at the academy where she was studying.
But her way to use the colors 
was really something she
found out for herself.
She had the impression that 
she could create colors
by just looking at them
and to transform them.
That was the moment
when she knew that she
has found something.
She used to say ‘I discovered the 
principles of modernism by myself
by my deep paint or color seeing.
1945 was the end of the war 
and she would have
a small studio in Klagenfurt
and this was the meeting point
for many poets, artists, musicians.
Many of them very
influenced by surrealism.
Young Arnulf Rainer 
was coming there
and that was also an 
important relationship to her,
they would travel together 
to Paris, meet Paul Célan,
but not only meet Paul Célan,  
also meet the Surrealists
meet André Breton.
It was actually in December 1960
when she moved to Paris
to live there for eight years.
You actually see the first painting
she did there is totally different
because Maria was someone, 
when she moved to another place
she totally started anew.
The first paintings that
she did in Paris ’60 and ’61
in these paintings, 
this whole relationship
between her body, 
the painting, the canvas,
the space around the canvas, 
the space around her body
that these things really 
came to a form which then
stayed with her 
throughout her whole career.
Maria Lassnig found out that 
in a maximum of concentration
she can express 
on the canvas
what she’s feeling in 
the inside of herself
the body sensations
the points where there is tension
or sometimes also pain.
Body awareness came 
out of her childhood.
She always said to me
‘Look Hans Werner,
there is the outer world.
This outer world is really huge 
and amazing and big
but the inner world, 
when you close your eyes
the inner world is so huge
you can go on and on and on.’
It’s an abstract form of the body
how she felt it and how she 
expressed the self portraits.
These are almost self-portraits
and they are put together 
in a very abstract way.
This is something
absolutely new in the history of art.
It was always a very 
direct relationship
between the body 
and the canvas.
She’s a very spontaneous painter,
you will not see paintings 
in many layers with her
it’s more the line in color 
and very fast painting.
Watercolors or drawings of 
course were even the most spontaneous
possibilities to create work.
In the ’60s she met Nancy Spero 
and Nancy Spero told her
‘Come to New York we have this 
women’s liberation movement
and everything is free.’
She came to New York and 
totally changed her life again.
The great thing about 
New York for her was
she discovered feminism.
She was a founding member 
of the Women/Artists/Filmmakers
a group of 10 women, among 
others Carolee Schneemann
who worked together who 
supported each other.
These exchanges were 
very important for her
and it would be mainly in 
this period in the 1970s
that she was really devote a 
lot of her time to filmmaking.
Stop motion pictures as well as 
experimental pictures
as well as pictures with 
a certain documentary aspect.
When she started teaching, 
it was 1980
at the Art Academy 
here in Vienna.
She came back from New York 
and changed her style again.
She stopped with film 
and started painting
in a new expressionist style.
The professorship of the 
academy enabled her
to work more continuously 
and consolidate her oeuvre
and the complexity of her 
oeuvre came in these years.
She was always a 
major Austrian artist
but she was looking for 
much more recognition
and for true and profound
international recognition.
This only came late in her life.
The first international 
shows in Switzerland
and Holland in the 1990s.
The participation at documenta
and following that a
major thing was the show
at the Serpentine Gallery
with Hans-Ulrich Obrist.
She never wanted her a 
painting to be considered
feminist, even though it is.
She didn’t want to be pigeonholed, 
she wanted to be compared
with the best of her craft, 
of her art, of her field.
She wanted to be compared 
with Baselitz, with Gerhard Richter
with Lucian Freud, 
Francis Bacon; these kind of artists.
I think that Maria Lassnig is 
really a contemporary artist.
She doesn’t look back 
with her paintings
and she was curious 
about many things about the world.
She was finding this new 
dimension for art
in the sensation, 
in the feelings
in the body awareness.
I think that she is more a 
painter of the 21st century
than of the 20th century.
You also see how strongly
she influences young artists.
She was so ahead of
time with certain things
that it was just not 
understood in the 20th century.
All her life she was
alone in her studio.
She says ‘time is no matter at all
while I’m painting’ she said,
‘because you are actually 
then in a timeless period
or even in a timeless landscape
where time is not 
going on. It just stops.’
