The artist Maria Lassnig lived in New York from 1968 to 1980, where she discovered her passion for filmmaking. Using the simplest of means, she created groundbreaking short films during this time, in which she transferred her concept of “body awareness” to the moving image. These films reveal Lassnig’s unmistakable view of the world – people, animals and objects take on new forms – but above all of herself. The critical and humorous perspective that characterizes her visual work is given a voice – in the truest sense of the word, when she synchronizes the films with her own texts.
“My animation is an artform,” she wrote in one of her notebooks.
Maria Lassnig experimented in her films, was curious and courageous. If one places her films in relation to her drawings, paintings and writings of the time, it becomes clear that Lassnig drew on recurring patterns in her art, but at the same time constantly reinvented herself. Maria Lassnig published her “canonical films” during her lifetime. She commissioned Mara Mattuschka and Hans Werner Poschauko to restore her “Films in Progress” only after her death. The exhibition MARIA LASSNIG. SELF AS CAMERA shows a selection of the artist’s films against the backdrop of her painterly and poetic work in the USA. It thus provides an intimate view of Maria Lassnig – through her own lens.
Künstlerhaus Vereinigung
Die Künstlerhaus Vereinigung, Gesellschaft bildender Künstlerinnen und Künstler Österreichs, ist eine autonome, gemeinnützige Künstlervereinigung. Von ihrer Gründung 1861 bis heute animiert ein offenes, diskursives und interdisziplinäres Programm in Form von Ausstellungen und Veranstaltungen zum Besuch des Künstlerhauses.
MARIA LASSNIG: Self as a camera
22 Mar 2024 - 14 Apr 2024
Künstlerhaus, Karlsplatz, Wien, Österreich
Maria Lassnig, Iris (Soul Sisters), 1971, (c)Maria Lassnig Stiftung / courtesy sixpackfilm