Maria Lassnig’s late paintings and drawings turn the body into an instrument of knowledge rather than a subject of depiction. A focused presentation in Hong Kong gathers works on canvas and paper spanning 1987 to 2008, consolidating the artist’s lifelong inquiry into what she termed “body awareness”: the conviction that felt sensation—pressure, ache, breath, weight—is a more reliable ground for representation than the mirror or the camera. The selection places self-portraits in dialogue with machines, animals and abstract structures, charting how inner states displace the “retinal image” with somatic evidence.
The exhibition’s center of gravity is “Selbst mit Drachen (Self with Dragon)” (2005), where a mythic creature emerges less as antagonist than as an extension of the self. Lassnig stages the dragon as a register of tension—an embodiment of intrusive forces that are simultaneously internal and external. This negotiation, pitched between threat and recognition, echoes across the surrounding works, where bodies are truncated, hybridized or interfaced with devices not for effect but to record sensation at its point of origin.
“Viktory (Victory)” (1992) distills that logic into a hard, emblematic geometry. A broad, angular “V”—at once posture and sign—structures the field, fusing corporeal feeling with symbolic architecture. The letter functions as a scaffold for emotion, showing how language and sign systems contour bodily experience. Rather than staging a triumph, the canvas reads as a diagram of steadiness under strain.
Several canvases press further into abstraction without relinquishing the self. In “Selbst abstrakt I / Bienenkorb Selbst (Self Abstract I / Beehive Self)” (1993), the head assumes the ventilation and massing of a beehive, a vessel charged with hum, heat and pressure. “Selbst als Blüte (Self as a Flower)” (1993) aligns aging flesh with botanical structure, not sentimentally but analytically, proposing continuity between human and vegetal anatomies. These works operate like cross-sections of feeling, converting states—swell, throb, contraction—into form.
The works on paper anchor the presentation in the present tense. Lassnig treated drawing as a seismograph—closest to the instant—allowing a single line to register the shift from solitude to relation. In “Liegende (Reclining Figures)” (2000) and “Liebespaar (Lovers)” (2003), figures drift toward and away from one another without settling into fixed contour. “Mr and Mrs Kliny” (2004) holds that ambiguity, sketching a dyad whose dynamics remain unresolved by design. Monochrome sheets such as “Ober und Unterkörper (Torso and Lower Body)” (1990) and “Die Vielfalt (Diversity)” (2003) strip the figure to pressure points; spareness becomes strategy, isolating curvature and compression that color might overdetermine. Lassnig’s insistence that each drawing is autonomous—never a step toward a definitive oil—underscores the ethic of attention running through the show.
Taken together, these paintings and drawings argue for sensation as knowledge and for the body as a porous site where the world leaves its traces. Machines, animals and alphabetic signs are not external props but languages the self uses to measure impact. The hybrids and partial figures that result are instruments, not fragments: calibrated tools for recording intensities that conventional portraiture overlooks. The exhibition’s restraint—tight selection, clear sightlines, measured juxtapositions—allows the works to read as case studies in perception, each one offering a different protocol for translating an internal state into visible form.
What emerges is not a rejection of likeness but a redefinition of it. Lassnig paints what a head feels like to inhabit rather than how a head looks; she draws a relation as a shift in contour rather than as a narrative scene. In the process, she widens the vocabulary of self-portraiture, admitting diagrams, emblems and mythic proxies as legitimate registers of the self. The result is a body of work that approaches accuracy—understood as fidelity to experience—by refusing the comforts of optical description.
Venue and dates: Hauser & Wirth Hong Kong — 26 September 2025 to 28 February 2026.
