Los Angeles Survey for Maria Lassnig, September 17th, Hauser Wirth & Schimmel
Hauser Wirth & Schimmel have announced that their latest show will be 'Maria Lassnig: A Painting Survey 1950 - 2007.' This will be the first ever Los Angeles exhibition for the Austrian artist who died in 2014.
The artist - who pioneered the 'body awareness' (painting how a sensation felt from within) pioneer was born in Carinthia in Southern Austria in 1919. She studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna in the midst of the Second World War, beginning in the winter semester 1940/1941 and graduating in 1945.
In post-war Europe, she quickly moved away from the state-approved academic realism in which she had been trained, turning to Austria’s own avant-garde past and finding inspiration in the coloration of Oskar Kokoschka and the expressionist figuration of Egon Schiele.
‘Maria Lassnig. A Painting Survey, 1950 – 2007’ reveals the ways in which the artist drew from and challenged conventions of abstraction to create a singular figuration.
Organized chronologically, the exhibition unfolds over five rooms, beginning with the early 1950s. In such rarely seen oil paintings as the 1953 works ‘Flächenteilung Schwarz-Weiß-Grau 2’ and ‘Flächenteilung Schwarz- Weiß-Grau 1,’ viewers can see Lassnig exploring an abstract visual language bolstered by her immersion in French avant-garde circles and her relationships with such writers such as Paul Celan, Friederike Mayröcker, and Oswald Wiener.
Hauser & Wirth first exhibited Lassnig’s work in London in 2004 and again in Zurich in 2007. In 2009, the gallery published ‘Maria Lassnig: The Pen is the Sister of the Brush,' a selection from the artist's diaries from 1943 to 1997.
Hauser Wirth & Schimmel 17 September – 31 December 2016 Opening: Friday 16 September 2016, 6 – 8 pm
