"The hardest thing is to really concentrate on the feeling while drawing. Not drawing a rear end because you know what it looks like, but drawing the rear end feeling."
-Maria Lansig, Austrian painter and progenitor of self-styled theory of " Body Awareness" in painting.
Lansig lived in New York City from 1968-80 , where she attended animation school , made films and also painted . She received wide spread recognition only toward the end of her life. She died in 2014 at the age of 94, leaving hundreds of searingly toned , grotesquely funny self portraits and several films . Her influence can be seen upon contemporary artists Nicole Eisenman and Dana Schultz and many other virtuosos of mark-making who have refuted the pretense that a portrait should be comprised of uniform constituent parts, synchronized speeds, smoothed out and resolved tones .
"When I was young, I was clear enough to know that if I got married or had children, I would be eaten. I would be sick if I couldn't paint and I would be schizophrenic because I would've wanted both. So I renounced it."
The schisms that are held into place, in place by force of will, reason, and also by letting loose into the world of sensation, this is the tension that I responded to personally in Lansig's work after having first seen her portraits at PS 1 two years before her death. Furthering that sense of schism is the palette which tugs at the antipodes of the spectrum, and also the lighting. While Fancis Bacon staged his own writhing forms within theatrically lit boxes that offered some narrative structure to his paintings, Lansig's forms are fundamentally freewheeling in a world without compus points. They are held in the glare of the 24 hour convenience store , specimens as opposed to character actors. Their physical dismemberment is less a mutation than a de-evolution of figures seeking return to their previous embryological unitive state . Finally the blindfolding, which serves as a signifier , reminding us that when one faculty is compromised there is a subsequent compensatory brilliance in other secondary faculties. In this instance the blindfolded gaze is not directed inward to the seeking interior nor seeking escape , but anchored to the cusp of registered feedback. The open gashes of mouths are seeking the sensate world like rooting infants.
Lansig's portraits comprised of pixelated, particulate marks are resist cohesion but not coherence . There is a strong strain of reason for all their ambiguity, some abiding law along the lines of honing one's sensitivities to liminal space before our experience becomes our identity. Like Kalho before her, Lansig was a master of depicting the skin both as our primary registry of feedback and also as the final frontier between inner and outer worlds.
-Maria Lansig, Austrian painter and progenitor of self-styled theory of " Body Awareness" in painting.
Lansig lived in New York City from 1968-80 , where she attended animation school , made films and also painted . She received wide spread recognition only toward the end of her life. She died in 2014 at the age of 94, leaving hundreds of searingly toned , grotesquely funny self portraits and several films . Her influence can be seen upon contemporary artists Nicole Eisenman and Dana Schultz and many other virtuosos of mark-making who have refuted the pretense that a portrait should be comprised of uniform constituent parts, synchronized speeds, smoothed out and resolved tones .
"When I was young, I was clear enough to know that if I got married or had children, I would be eaten. I would be sick if I couldn't paint and I would be schizophrenic because I would've wanted both. So I renounced it."
The schisms that are held into place, in place by force of will, reason, and also by letting loose into the world of sensation, this is the tension that I responded to personally in Lansig's work after having first seen her portraits at PS 1 two years before her death. Furthering that sense of schism is the palette which tugs at the antipodes of the spectrum, and also the lighting. While Fancis Bacon staged his own writhing forms within theatrically lit boxes that offered some narrative structure to his paintings, Lansig's forms are fundamentally freewheeling in a world without compus points. They are held in the glare of the 24 hour convenience store , specimens as opposed to character actors. Their physical dismemberment is less a mutation than a de-evolution of figures seeking return to their previous embryological unitive state . Finally the blindfolding, which serves as a signifier , reminding us that when one faculty is compromised there is a subsequent compensatory brilliance in other secondary faculties. In this instance the blindfolded gaze is not directed inward to the seeking interior nor seeking escape , but anchored to the cusp of registered feedback. The open gashes of mouths are seeking the sensate world like rooting infants.
Lansig's portraits comprised of pixelated, particulate marks are resist cohesion but not coherence . There is a strong strain of reason for all their ambiguity, some abiding law along the lines of honing one's sensitivities to liminal space before our experience becomes our identity. Like Kalho before her, Lansig was a master of depicting the skin both as our primary registry of feedback and also as the final frontier between inner and outer worlds.