Maria Lassnig

Over a remarkable career that spanned seven decades, from the late 1940s at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, a city where she then taught in the 1980s, to the Paris art scene of the 1950s and 1960s, and New York in the 1970s, Austrian artist Maria Lassnig (1919-2014) created artworks that explored her body in a way that was both sensitive and vulnerable. Focusing on her self-portraits and exploration of the body and relationships with animal and machine, the exhibition at Fundació Antoni Tàpies presents works from 1942 to her last years, leaving aside the period of the 'isms', as Lassnig called them – surrealism, tachisme, informalism – as well as the German and Parisian influences of her formative years, to concentrate on works created starting from the 1970s and during her time in New York, when her concept of 'body awareness' reached its maximum expression, accompanied by her writings and animated films.