“Maria Lassnig: The Ninth Decade”
mumok – Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien
Museumsplatz 1
February 13–May 10, 2009
Curated by Wolfgang Drechsler
In the year Maria Lassnig turns ninety, two independently planned shows approach the Austrian artist’s oeuvre from multiple perspectives. Vienna’s MUMOK, following up on its comprehensive Lassnig retrospective of 1999, will devote its galleries to work the artist has made since—that is, during her ninth decade. Meanwhile, in Cologne, Museum Ludwig’s “Maria Lassnig: Inside Out” offers a heterogeneous selection of the artist’s drawings and watercolors—from her early Expressionist sketches of the late 1940s to recent experiments in lurid color and fine pencil. Best known now for her rigorously precise but never humorless examination of herself, her own form and its failings, Lassnig should prove to be a feminist visionary for the generation of artists to come.
Translated from German by Oliver E. Dryfuss.