Maria Lassnig is part pig, part camel; part skinned rabbit, part dog. She’s a tumbling mess of fleshy folds, a pink collision of human shapes and animal parts.
The Austrian artist spent almost her whole career trying to figure out her body through her painting. The confusing relationship we all have with our blobby earthly vessels is played out on these walls in works spanning more than 60 years. It’s monomaniacal and obsessive, as if she stared at herself naked in the mirror for decades. But it’s also affecting, real and sometimes very beautiful.
The dark early colourfield abstractions from the 1950s give way to rushed, messy, expressive daubings, and by 1960 there’s a recognisable palette emerging. Pinks, yellows and lilacs course across the works, neon visions of unnatural abstraction.
Then she turns those colours on herself, creating blocky, multidimensional animal-human hybrids that reek of pain and incomprehension. By 1975, the move to figuration seems complete, but the colours have gone sombre. The two best works here are sickly green self-portraits. They’re images of someone coming to terms – badly – with ageing. Lassnig smokes and drinks, her body drained of blood and vitality, leaving only bile, mucus and the shock of living.
But maybe all that reality got too much for her, because the surrealism creeps back in in a big way in the works from the ’80s onwards. There are semi-human pink and purple figures lying on fields of phlegmy green, a baby surrounded by gun-toting gangsters, a green belly trailing its umbilical cord. Later works are bigger, clearer, white, but no less tormented.
The problem is that in presenting itself as an overview of a major artist’s whole career, this show is a failure – it doesn’t tell the full story, it doesn’t show you enough art and it’s just a bit half-arsed. But as an insight into an influential figure of twentieth-century European painting, it’s just enough to keep you interested.