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MoMA PS1 announces Maria Lassnig exhibition

MoMA PS1 presents the most comprehensive survey of painter Maria Lassnig (b. 1919, Austria) organized in the United States, an exhibition on view March 9–May 25.

Maria Lassnig, Transparentes Selbstporträt (Transparent Self-Portrait), 1987. Oil on canvas, 49.25 x 39.5 inches. Courtesy the artist.
Maria Lassnig, Transparentes Selbstporträt (Transparent Self-Portrait), 1987. Oil on canvas, 49.25 x 39.5 inches. Courtesy the artist.
The presentation includes over seventy major works spanning almost seven decades, most of which are being exhibited for the first time in the U.S. Organized by Peter Eleey, Maria Lassnig includes 55 paintings, 14 works on paper, and four filmic works, and will be on view at MoMA PS1 through May 25.

Lassnig is one of the most important contemporary painters living today, and is a pioneer in many areas of art. Emphatically refusing to make “pictures,” she has long focused on ways of representing her internal world. Using the term “body awareness,” Lassnig has regularly tried to paint the way her body feels to her from the inside, rather than attempting to depict it from without. Throughout a remarkable career that has spanned more than 70 years, Lassnig has continued to create work that vulnerably explores the way she comes into contact with the world, often placing particular emphasis upon the disjunctions between her own self-image and the way she is seen by others—as a woman, as a painter, as a thinker, and as a person living through the dramatic technological and cultural developments that have marked the century of her lifetime. Bravely exposing personal traumas, fantasies and nightmares, Lassnig’s art offers instruction for courageous living in a time of increasingly spectacularized social interaction.