Maria Lassnig: In the Mirror of Possibilities: Watercolors and Drawings from 1947 to the Present

There are few enough female artists who have maintained an international reputation across the entire second half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, but fortunately the Austrian painter Maria Lassnig (born 1919) is one of them. Lassnig has painted and drawn for over 60 years, and the freshness of her work only increases as she continues to give body (or bodies) to her emotions--sometimes seriously, sometimes humorously--on canvas and on paper. In the Mirror of Possibilities focuses on her very personal drawings and watercolors, from early drawings of the 1940s and her "body sensation drawings," to the New York animations and the more painterly forms found in her watercolors of the 1980s and 1990s. But the bulk of this volume is devoted to Lassnig's most recent works, in which the artist combines simple pencil drawing with strangely lurid backgrounds, advancing her admirable will to reconstrue the body by means of art.