If you could make visible the experience of having – or inhabiting – a body, what would that look like? This is the question Maria Lassnig (1919–2014) spent her career answering. The term she used for her project of visually recording physical sensations was ‘body awareness’. ‘I have been painting body awareness since I first began to paint,’ Lassnig wrote in 1970. ‘I can recommend it as an ideal artistic activity, for it is inexhaustible.’ The current survey at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (travelling to the Albertina in September), organised to mark 100 years since the artist’s birth in the rural Austrian town of Kappel am Krappfeld, certainly bears out her case. Not only her paintings but also her drawings and collages, sculptures and films – more than 200 works in total, spread across 15 rooms – testify to the continual inspiration Lassnig derived from her mission.
To read more, click here, or download it below.
