Happy Birthday, Maria
Maria Lassnig, today, Tuesday 8 September, turns 90. Wow. She is one of the most inventive and original painters alive. No less. And she still says deadpan things like this, on the occasion of her 90th birthday: ‘I was never young, and now I’m old.’
With her radically phenomenological approach (can I paint an image of my body’s awareness of itself?), Lassnig is the antipode to the Richterian school of measured abstraction from the painter’s body. Congratulations! Health, and bring on at least another decade!
Watch this – Lassnig, in 1992, telling her life story in the form of a street ballad. If you don’t speak German, read this – interview published in issue 103 of frieze in November 2006.
(image: Maria Lassnig photographed this summer in Corynthia, by Sepp Dreissinger)
Maria Lassnig, today, Tuesday 8 September, turns 90. Wow. She is one of the most inventive and original painters alive. No less. And she still says deadpan things like this, on the occasion of her 90th birthday: ‘I was never young, and now I’m old.’
With her radically phenomenological approach (can I paint an image of my body’s awareness of itself?), Lassnig is the antipode to the Richterian school of measured abstraction from the painter’s body. Congratulations! Health, and bring on at least another decade!
Watch this – Lassnig, in 1992, telling her life story in the form of a street ballad. If you don’t speak German, read this – interview published in issue 103 of frieze in November 2006.
(image: Maria Lassnig photographed this summer in Corynthia, by Sepp Dreissinger)
