(Kappel, Carinthia, 1919–2014 Vienna)
‘Informel’, signed and dated on the reverse M. Lassnig 1951, oil on jute, 54 x 68 cm, framed, (K)

Christa Murken, Maria Lassnig, Verlag Murken-Altrogge, 1990, catalogue raisonné no. 54

Exhibited and illustrated in the catalogue:
Maria Lassnig, Museum moderner Kunst/Museum des 20. Jahrhunderts, Vienna/Kunstmuseum Düsseldorf/Kunsthalle Nürnberg, Kärntner Landesgalerie, Klagenfurt, Ritter Verlag, 1985, p. 52

Provenance:
From an Austrian Collection

The autonomy of form that could be observed in her art as early as the 1950s and which allowed Maria Lassnig to immerse herself in colour experiments even more deeply was significantly helped by her encounter with informal painting in Paris from 1951 on. In those days, existentially perceived Tachist images in which the body was rendered as a ‘hurled heap of colour’ (Lassnig) in some undefined and purely painterly space were produced under the heading of ‘Art Informel’...
Lassnig’s abstract, expressive paintings can definitely be considered the precursors of her later concept of ‘body awarenesses’. Within bundled and sensitively structured masses of paint, delicately nuanced tones constrast with vacant, bright, and light-suffused backgrounds. As ‘some mass in space’, ‘contraction’ or ‘informal self-portrait as dumpling’, the sensed ‘body shell’ (Lassnig) presents itself partly as a loose, amorphous mass opening up or as a formation vehemently outlined with a thick brush...
From: Christa Murken, Maria Lassnig (Informel and Tachisme)