The Austrian artist is one of the most important painters of our time. Her film work, on the other hand, is still an insider tip. Her great animated films were shown at the Berlinale
Lascivious chairs that swing their legs to silent film music, swell to bursting and expel their insides. Couples that flow into each other, fight against each other, cut each other apart. A naked woman with mountainous breasts, thigh valleys and buttocks in a distorting mirror. Maria Lassnig leaves no doubt about what her short films are about. Body feelings, pain, anger, man-woman relationships, the forces of attraction and repulsion between the sexes were the life theme of the Austrian artist, who was born in Carinthia in 1919 as an illegitimate farmer's child and died in Vienna in 2014 as a celebrated painter. A year before her death, she received the Golden Lion for her life's work at the Venice Biennale.
Her painting studies in the 1940s at the Vienna Academy were overshadowed by the Nazi era, where her colorful expressionist style was insulted as “degenerate”. To escape the conservative climate of the post-war period, Lassnig went to Paris in 1960, where she found her own body-focused painting style, but was otherwise quite disappointed by the Surrealist salon lions who preferred to stylize women as sex objects rather than recognize them as equal artists. In search of a more cosmopolitan scene, she moved to New York in 1968, where she created many of her iconic self-portraits, often nude, distorted and unsparing in shimmering greenish flesh tones. At that time she also started her first film experiments. She bought a 16mm camera and shot short cartoon clips in her studio. She set the animations with stencils, mirrors and distorted photos to music herself, often with jingling baroque music or snappy rhymes she sang herself. From today's perspective, it all seems jerky and improvised, touchingly handmade, and sometimes strange and funny. At the time it was unheard of - and too much even for New York's art taste.
In the best moments, the anarchic-explosive energy that ultimately made Maria Lassnig one of the most important artists of our time shines through in these little films. In 1980 she was appointed to the Vienna University of Applied Sciences - the first woman in the German-speaking world to receive a professorship in painting. Her first reaction: She would take the job “only on the condition that you pay me what you pay Joseph Beuys.” To Lassnig's great astonishment, the Austrian cultural officials agreed. And her career finally took off. She represented Austria at the Venice Biennale, was invited to Documenta several times, had major museum exhibitions and was finally able to make a living from her painting. As a professor, she also founded the teaching studio for experimental animated films and continued to make animated films herself. Some of them were shown at the Berlinale, including the early short films from New York: Chairs, Couples, Shapes, Selfportrait and irises. Chairs, Couples, Shapes, Selfportrait und Iris.
There was also the world premiere of Sleeping with a Tiger in the Berlinale Forum program Sleeping with a Tigera bio-pic with game scenes and documentary sequences by Anja Salomonowitz. Maria Lassnig is played by Birgit Minichmayr. You can see her sweltering in her underwear in the studio, suffering, making faces as she remembers her rough childhood in Carinthia. Later she grumbles to gallery owners, curators and collectors in a leopard skin coat and eccentric sunglasses. This is probably all true. Lassnig was considered highly sensitive, solitary and difficult. Many videos on YouTube bear witness to this, including the portrait film Maria Lassnig - It's the art, yes... Maria Lassnig – Es ist die Kunst, jaja…by Sepp Dreissinger, who accompanied the artist for ten years and shows her painting, thinking in the studio or cutting blades of grass in the meadow.
Sleeping with a Tiger is also the name of one of her most famous paintings. The artist is shown on the ground, overwhelmed and ecstatic, having sex with the predator. In general, Maria Lassnig's nature and emotional world are probably best revealed in dialogue with her works. It is also worth taking a detour to the Neue Nationalgalerie, where two great paintings by her are currently hanging in the collection presentation: The Patriotic Family and Self-Portrait as a Native American Girl. Die Patriotische Familie und Self-Portrait as Native American Girl.
A very informative catalog about her films was recently published: Maria Lassnig. The cinematic work, edited by Eszter Kondor, Michael Loebenstein. Peter Pakesch, Hans Werner Poschauko (FilmmuseumSynemaPublikationen, 2021) is the first comprehensive directory of their film work with contributions from former companions such as Carolee Schneemann, Ulrike Ottinger and Paul McCarthy, facsimiles from their notebooks and a DVD with posthumously published “films in progress” .