UCCA announces the first presentation of Maria Lassnig’s work in China

Maria Lassnig, Two Ways of Being (Double Self-Portrait), 2000, oil on canvas, 100 × 125 cm.© Maria Lassnig Foundation

Maria Lassnig (1919-2014) is internationally regarded as one of the leading artists of the twentieth century. Throughout a remarkable career that spanned more than 70 years, Lassnig regularly tried to paint the way her body felt, rather than how it looked. Though she lived most of her life in Austria, she spent significant periods abroad, including in Paris and New York. Featuring work from all creative periods of Lassnig’s career—including her early involvement with graphic abstraction, her “realist” paintings of the 1970s, and her innovative late self-portraits—the exhibition will notably offer a thematic approach to her groundbreaking and varied oeuvre. Curated by Peter Eleey, UCCA Curator-at-Large, and Antonia Hoerschelmann, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Albertina Museum, the exhibition will be the first significant presentation of Lassnig’s work in China, and is organized in cooperation with the Albertina Museum, Vienna, and the Maria Lassnig Foundation.

About the Artist

Maria Lassnig (1919-2014) was born in Carinthia in Southern Austria and studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna in the midst of the Second World War. She lived in Paris from 1960 to 1968, and then in New York from 1968 until 1980, when she returned to Vienna to teach at the University of Applied Arts. She received a Golden Lion for lifetime achievement at the Venice Biennale in 2013, and at the time of her death in 2014 was the subject of an important solo exhibition at MoMA PS1 in New York. Since then, prominent shows of her work have been organized at Tate Liverpool (2016), Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw (2017), and the National Gallery, Prague, and Kunstmuseum Basel (both 2018). The Albertina Museum, Vienna, and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, jointly presented the major survey “Ways of Being” in 2019.

About the Exhibition

Duration: 2023.9.2 - 2024.1.7

Venue: Central Gallery & New Gallery, UCCA

Courtesy of UCCA Center for Contemporary Art.