(Kappel, Carinthia, 1919–2014 Vienna)
“Blasse Hockende”, on the reverse signed, dated
M. Lassnig 72 as well as titled on the stretcher
“Blasse Hockende” there dated 1971, oil on canvas, 130 x 112 cm, framed

Illustrated and registered in:
Christa Murken, Maria Lassnig, Ihr Leben und ihr Malerisches Werk. Ihre kunstgeschichtliche Stellung in der Malerei des 20. Jahrhunderts, Verlag Murken-Altrogge, 1990, ill. p. 32, registered p. 467, cat. raisonné no. 294- there the note: owned by the artist Kunstforum, Insel Austria, Österreichische Kunst heute, 1987, vol. 89, p. 189 (ill.)

Exhibited and full-page colour ill.:
Maria Lassnig, Museum moderner Kunst/Museum des 20. Jahrhunderts, Vienna 1985
Kunstmuseum Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf 1985
Kunsthalle Nürnberg, Nuremberg 1985
Kärntner Landesgalerie, Klagenfurt 1985, Ritter Verlag, Klagenfurt 1985, p. 80 (ill.)

Provenance:
Private Collection, Switzerland

I would like to be as independent as possible from machines and complicated tools.

The pencil and paintbrush are the original tools. Painting is one of the original forms of art.

I stand naked in front of the canvas, as it were, without intentions, without a plan, without a model, without a photograph, and let it be created. But I do have a starting point, which arose from the realisation that the only thing that is truly real to me is my feelings that play out within the housing of my body: physiological nature, the feeling of pressure when sitting and lying down, feelings of being compressed and stretching out into space – things which are quite hard to depict.

“Only pain is real” (Kafka).

As a result, painting has also kept changing throughout my long history of experimentation.

When I created a bridge to the outside world from within this internal architecture, which, from time to time, laid claim to its right to be elusive for the enjoyment of the eyes and senses, it started with the limited field of vision of the eye’s arch; what a child first sees; its own arms and legs as a real image.

From here on, the division into images of the internal and external world began. In the last New York series, the images of the external world included animals as beings that were mysterious to me. Painting as an elementary activity is my tool for meditation, I don’t need a shrink or a guru.
Maria Lassnig (1980)
From the aforementioned catalogue