Bodycheck – Martin Kippenberger – Maria Lassnig

The self, one's own body

Under the title BODYCHECK, two great artistic personalities of the late 20th century are shown who, in the era of painterly abstraction and the emerging "political correctness", understood artistic work with the body as a grotesque staging of the female and male body as a theatricality of the body and limbs as well as the head and eyes. Maria Lassnig (1919-2014) repeatedly revisited this humorously grotesque discourse as a self-ironic means of artistic expression and feminist weapon in her paintings over the decades, presenting herself as a torso, as an animal with prostheses and in permanent organic metamorphosis. Martin Kippenberger's (1953-1997) paintings, sculptures and drawings are consistently underpinned by an enigmatic grotesqueness in which comics and abysmal humour are the means of expression of a painful, even tragic experience of the world, where "no one helps anyone". The self, one's own body, is allegorically entangled or fragmented in artefacts and linguistic constructs. Salvation remains a utopia. Lassnig and Kippenberger never met, but the proximity in their choice of motifs is astounding. Kippenberger very probably saw exhibitions by Lassnig (Düsseldorf 1985) and, conversely, the Austrian artist quite obviously engaged with his oeuvre after his early death. The exhibition, which can only be seen in Bolzano, and the book juxtapose body images by both artists from two decades and thus provide insights into the gender-specific understanding of roles in art at the end of the 20th century.

Exhibition:
Museion Bolzano, 3/2 - 6/5/2018
Lenbachhaus Munich, 21/5 - 15/9/2019