Maria Lassnig

The Serpentine exhibition, the first solo presentation of her work in a public gallery in the UK, will include the first ever showing of a selection of Lassnig’s sensational fresh and vibrant oil paintings from the last three years and rarely exhibited films.

Lassnig uses bold forms and strong colours to create portraits and semi-figurative abstractions, which reject the static tendencies of traditional portraiture. She coined the phrase ‘body-awareness paintings’ to describe a visual language that she invented and uses in her work to depict the invisible aspects of inner sensations where there is a continual resistance against the repetitive and static. She has repeatedly used her own body, in her view an inexhaustible subject, as a tacit source to explore human sensory experience.

Lassnig was born in Carinthia, Austria, in 1919, and trained in Vienna. She spent several years in Paris in the 1950s and 1960s where she was exposed to Abstract Expressionism and Surrealism. She lived in New York from 1968 to 1980, making films that used her ‘body-awareness’ as a basis for her remarkably inventive and humorous narratives.