Maria LassnigKörperbilder/ body awareness painting

Maria Lassnig (1919–2014) was one of the formative Austrian artists of the period after 1945, whose painterly work has attracted enormous interest beyond her home country in recent years through retrospective exhibitions in Munich, Cologne, London and Cincinnati. Characteristic of that work are a muted palette, fragmented and even sculptural-seeming depictions of figures and bodies, quirky subjects and idiosyncratic pictorial perspectives – a body of work that had initially been reintroduced into the discussion by an art history inspired above all by feminism. Now, however, the tide has turned for the Carinthian artist; at last there is movement in the standing of this artist’s artist, as is evidenced not least by the retrospective at the Deichtorhallen Hamburg 2013, which was previously on view at the Neue Galerie Graz. The present book, edited by Andrea Madesta, appeared at the time on the occasion of the exhibition “body awareness painting” in Klagenfurt in the spring of 2006 and was immediately out of print in the shops. We have now succeeded, on the occasion of the exhibition in Hamburg, in making the remainder of the print run that had stayed in Carinthia available to the trade once more, so that we can now offer it. The exceptionally attractive volume, with a comprehensive overview of the artist’s complex work, provides an outstanding introduction.