Maria Lassnig @ Serpentine Gallery

The Serpentine exhibition, the first solo presentation of her work in a public gallery in the UK, will include the first ever showing of a selection of Lassnig’s sensational fresh and vibrant oil paintings from the last three years and rarely exhibited films.

Viennese painter Maria Lassnig (b.1919) has been producing work over a period of 60 years in Paris, New York and Vienna. She is an avant-garde pioneer with a feminist viewpoint, continuing to produce some of her best work. Lassnig's powerful, bold and introspective paintings investigate human emotions and bodily sensations. <br />

Lassnig uses bold forms and strong colours to create portraits and semi-figurative abstractions, which reject the static tendencies of traditional portraiture. She coined the phrase ‘body-awareness paintings’ to describe a visual language that she invented and uses in her work to depict the invisible aspects of inner sensations where there is a continual resistance against the repetitive and static. She has repeatedly used her own body, in her view an inexhaustible subject, as a tacit source to explore human sensory experience.