Hauser & Wirth is proud to present a major solo exhibition of works on paper by the renowned Austrian artist Maria Lassnig. Curated by Peter Pakesch, Director of the Maria Lassnig Foundation, the presentation celebrates the centenary of Maria Lassnig’s birth this year. Displaying rarely exhibited drawings and watercolours from the 1950s up until the 1990s, some of which have never been exhibited outside of the foundation’s archive, the presentation showcases over thirty works which deal with Lassnig’s investigations into the borders of abstraction. For Lassnig, the medium of drawing became an unequivocal space for experimentation with colour, shape and line, opening up new perspectives for her work which has largely been associated with her figurative ‘body-awareness’ compositions. The bodies of works on view can be seen not only as sketches and drafts for larger scale paintings, but as important stand-alone works that instigate new conversations around the artist’s oeuvre. The exhibition coincides with the retrospective ‘Maria Lassnig – Ways of Being’, which will travel to the Albertina Museum in Vienna from the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in September 2019.

Born in Carinthia in Southern Austria in 1919, Maria Lassnig’s (1919 – 2014) work is based on the observation of the physical presence of the body and what she termed ‘body awareness’, or ‘Körpergefühl’ in German. She studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna in the midst of the Second World War. Then, in post-war Europe, she quickly moved away from the state-approved academic realism in which she was trained, looking to Austria’s own avant-garde past, such as the coloration of Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele’s expressionist treatment of figuration.