Maria Lassnig

Maria Lassnig was born in 1919 in Kappel am Krappfeld in Carinthia. After studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and after her surrealistic beginnings, she went to Paris in 1951 in order to familiarize herself with contemporary artistic trends. Returning to Vienna in 1952, Lassnig became a formative influence on the burgeoning informal painting in Austria. Ultimately, the development of her "Körpergefühlbilder" (body sensation paintings) should be characteristic of her extensive oeuvre. In the course of the years, Maria Lassnig freed herself from stylistic constraints and based her work entirely on these content-related expressions, her very own inventions and feelings. After several years in Paris, Lassnig moved to New York in 1968, from where she returned to Vienna in 1980 to take up a professorship at the University of Applied Arts. Representative of her impressive exhibition biography are her participations in 1980 at the Venice Biennale and in 1982 at the "documenta VII" in Kassel. The artist died in Vienna in 2014.