Maria Lassnig 1919 – 2014, National Gallery, Prague

Maria Lassnig 1919 – 2014
February 16 – June 17, 2018
“Maria Lassnig 1919-2014” at The National Gallery in Prague is the first in Czech Republic large scale exhibition of the groundbreaking oeuvre of one of the most distinguished artists of the present day, Maria Lassnig (Austria, 1919-2014), on view along with “My Animation Is an Artform. Maria Lassnig, the Filmmaker” (Moving Image Department) which focuses on Lassnig’s pioneering animation work.

Featuring over 50 large-format paintings, drawings and watercolor series, as well as sculptures and films that reveal Lassnig’s long standing exploration of the body and self-representation, the exhibition spans the artist’s entire, over seven-decades long, career; from the abstract works made during the 1940s in Vienna, through painterly experiments of the periods spent in Paris and New York, including cutting-edge cinematic work, down to the mature body of work after her return to Austria in1980, featuring rarely exhibited sculptures, and concluding with the paintings, drawings and watercolors made in the final years of her life that focus on self-portraiture and investigate the idea behind much of Lassnig’s art, namely the notion of “body awareness”, concentrated on the introspective experiences and depiction of the invisible aspects of the inner sensations, described by the artist in a following way: “I step in front of the canvas naked, as it were. I have no set purpose, plan, model or photography. I let things happen. But I do have a starting point, which has come from my realization that the only true reality are my feelings, played out within the confines of my body. They are physiological sensations: a feeling of pressure when I sit or lie down, feelings of tension and senses of spatial extent. These things are quite hard to depict”.

VENUE
National Gallery Prague
Trade Fair Palace
Dukelských hrdinů 47
170 00 Prague 7 – Holešovice

http://www.ngprague.cz/en/