Maria Lassnig

On June 23, 2002, the Rubens Prize of the City of Siegen is awarded for the 10th time. In the anniversary year, the Austrian painter Maria Lassnig is honoured for her pioneering artistic achievements. At the same time, the Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen is opening the major retrospective exhibition "Maria Lassnig. Body Portraits".

Maria Lassnig is one of the great artists of the late 20th and 21st centuries, who has created a multi-layered and highly regarded body of work in sixty years of artistic endeavour. As early as the 1940s, Maria Lassnig opened up a wide field with her body awareness paintings, which was unknown at the time. Without allowing herself to be influenced by short-lived trends, she consistently found new ways of expressing sensual feelings and subjective inner forms of perception, which she directly translated into her artistic signature.

The Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen is showing 60 paintings, drawings and films. Of these, 40 works from her brilliant early work from 1950 to 1970 will be on display, a fundamental creative phase in which she developed her specific formal vocabulary in several work phases. Lassnig's early work surprises at first glance with its stylistic pluralism. However, its coherence and stringency become clear when we consider the artistic approach that the artist still pursues today. The animated films demonstrate a different, humorous side to her art. The starting point for the animated drawings are central works from her graphic oeuvre. Mostly created in the 1970s, the animated films build a bridge to the artist's important late work. With 20 paintings from the years 1994 to 2002, the exhibition provides an insight into this most recent creative period.

This is the first time since 1985 that a retrospective Maria Lassnig exhibition has been presented in Germany. The Siegen exhibition represents a special opportunity to trace the links between Lassnig's early work and her later paintings, but also a special chance to understand why Maria Lassnig often serves as a role model for the younger generation of artists in particular and why her most recent work is not seen as a mere reference to a bygone era, but is admired for its topicality.

The exhibition is accompanied by a comprehensive catalogue with 50 colour illustrations and texts by Ursula Bode, Barbara Engelbach, Antje von Graevenitz, Insa Härtel and Bernhard Waldenfels as well as an interview with Maria Lassnig. A dense accompanying programme is dedicated to Maria Lassnig's work with lectures and films, as well as a revision of the Rubens Prize with a series of lectures. A catalogue will be published to accompany the exhibition.

Curator
Dr. Barbara Engelbach

The Rubens Prize of the City of Siegen

The Rubens Prize of the City of Siegen, founded in 1955, is awarded every five years to personalities who have distinguished themselves in European art through a groundbreaking artistic life's work. The award honours the painter-diplomat Peter Paul Rubens, who expressed the idea of European unification in his life's work long before it could become a political reality. Peter Paul Rubens – who was born in Siegen, grew up in Cologne and Antwerp, grew up artistically in Italy, was esteemed in France and worked as a diplomat in Spain and England - was the main master of European Baroque painting and set the artistic and European standards to which the award has been dedicated since 1957/58.
Before Maria Lassnig, the painters Hans Hartung (awarded the prize in 1958), Giorgio Morandi (1962), Francis Bacon (1967), Antoni Tàpies (1972), Fritz Winter (1977), Emil Schumacher (1982), Cy Twombly (1987), Rupprecht Geiger (1992) and Lucian Freud (1997) were honoured with the Rubens Prize.

The anniversary exhibition "Maria Lassnig. Body Portraits" is accompanied by a presentation of over 60 works by the nine previous Rubens Prize winners from the Lambrecht-Schadeberg private collection.

The exhibition was made possible thanks to the City of Siegen, the Peter Paul Rubens Foundation and RWE NET AG. We would also like to thank Deutsche Städte Medien GmbH and the Office for Economic Development of the District of Siegen-Wittgenstein for their additional support.