Gender and art

"The celebrated Austrian painter Maria Lassnig, currently the subject of a major exhibition at MoMA PS1 and the recipient of a Golden Lion for lifetime achievement at the 2013 Venice Biennale—where her work was included in Massimiliano Gioni’s “The Encyclopedic Palace”—died on May 6 at age 94.

[...]

Born in 1919 in southern Austria, Lassnig studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna during World War Two, but quickly broke with the school’s conventional formalism and embraced abstraction. She eventually returned to figuration, but developed a unique, whimsical, and revealing style of self-portraiture. [...]"

http://momaps1.org/exhibitions/view/376

"Maria Lassnig’s show at MoMA PS1 begins with a standoff. In a large self-portrait from 2005, the artist brandishes two guns: one is pointed at her own head, the other at the viewer. The title of this anxiety-inducing work is “You, or Me?”

It’s the perfect jumping-off point for a survey of this 94-year-old Austrian, whose approach to the figure is simultaneously introverted and extroverted. She paints in an exuberant, expressive style, unleashing gestural energy on the canvas while remaining carefully attuned (if you take her word for it) to the action inside her brain and under her skin.

In 1948 she coined the term “body awareness” to describe her science of the self, which she has pursued for more than half a century even as portraiture, and figurative painting in general, has fallen in and out of fashion."

“Maria Lassnig” runs through May 25 at MoMA PS1, 22-25 Jackson Avenue, at 46th Avenue, Long Island City, Queens; (718) 784-2084, momaps1.org.