Maria Lassnig A Painting Survey, 1950 – 2007
Hauser Wirth & Schimmel
Maria Lassnig paints like she’s too old to care what anyone else thinks, which is to say, Maria Lassnig paints wonderfully, with both experience and freshness rare to find combined. Immediately striking is her use of color, an almost Fauvist fascination with brilliance and hue. Lassnig manages to use literally every color in the rainbow in all of her paintings, but without the Lisa Frank/vomit association. Lassnig’s rainbows are instead muddied and rich, fluorescent yellow-greens blended with Guston-like pinks, conveying a sense of complexity and sadness. Even white is a color. Lassnig’s white is not the white of negation nor subtraction, but rather of presence and addition—or at least if it is a mark of deletion, of crossing out, it results in a palimpsest richer than any white I have seen before.
The subject of Maria Lassnig’s paintings is the human figure, but not as you and I know the body. Her figures lie on the planes of her canvas as if subconsciously formed and then forgotten. They hold the gestures of limbs, which are only stumps, really, the beginnings of bodies, and the intention of beings. These forms become even more surreal through the artist’s ungainly rendering and bizarre angles of the body. Even her commissioned and more realistic portraits suggest an internal world, in which perception is perhaps more important than form. Lassnig’s paintings materialize as unrestrained thoughts, private wanderings between exploration of color and obsession over form. They are brave. Inelegant elements, that somehow become elegant combinations.
