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‘I don’t paint the view of the body, but the feeling of the body.’

Maria Lassnig is one of the most important artists of Austrian modernism and was a radical pioneer of subjective painting. Her central concept – known as ‘body awareness painting’ – focuses not on external appearance, but on the inner feeling of the body. Lassnig did not ask: How do I look? but rather: How do I feel? Her paintings are direct translations of physical sensations – pain, pressure, emptiness, alienation – into colour and form.

After studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, she became intensely involved with the Informel style in the 1950s and lived in Paris and later in New York, where she engaged with feminist art and animated film. Her work always developed beyond stylistic conventions. In her often brutally honest self-portraits, she does not present herself as an ideal image, but as a fragile, sensitive self that reveals age, pain, insecurity and strength in equal measure.

Lassnig’s work is deeply autobiographical and universal at the same time. It deals with the relationship between the inner and outer worlds, the subject and the world – and with the question of how we can perceive ourselves at all. As one of the first female professors of painting in the German-speaking world (from 1980 at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna), she became an important voice in the art world – uncomfortable, courageous and groundbreaking.