Bodycheck – Martin Kippenberger – Maria Lassnig

Under the title BODYCHECK, two great artistic personalities of the late twentieth century are presented who, in the era of painterly abstraction and emerging “political correctness,” understood artistic work with the body as a grotesque staging of the female and the male, as a theatricality of the body and the limbs as well as of the head and the eyes. Maria Lassnig (1919–2014) took up this humorously grotesque discourse anew again and again in her pictures over decades, as a self-ironic artistic means of expression and a feminist weapon, presenting herself as a torso, as an animal with prostheses and in permanent organic metamorphosis. Martin Kippenberger’s (1953–1997) pictures, sculptures and drawings are consistently borne by an enigmatic grotesqueness in which comics and abysmal humour are the means of expressing a painful, indeed tragic experience of the world, where the rule is: “No one helps anyone!” The self, one’s own body, is allegorically entangled in artefacts and linguistic constructs, or else fragmented. Salvation remains a utopia. Lassnig and Kippenberger never met, but the closeness in their choice of motifs is astonishing. Kippenberger in all likelihood saw exhibitions of Lassnig’s work (Düsseldorf 1985), and conversely, after his early death, the Austrian artist evidently engaged closely with his oeuvre. The exhibition and the book juxtapose images of the body by both artists from two decades, thereby offering insights into the understanding of gender-specific roles in the art of the late twentieth century.

Exhibition:
Museion Bozen, 3/2 – 6/5/2018
Lenbachhaus München, 21/5 – 15/9/2019