Hauser and Wirth, Hong Kong Sept 26 2025 to Feb 28 2026
Hauser & Wirth’s Hong Kong exhibition of Maria Lassnig last year felt like a clear, unsentimental reminder of how much of contemporary figurative painting still sits in her shadow. The show gathered works from the 1960s through the early 2000s and framed them not as historical artifacts but as still-charged experiments in how a body can be felt, pictured, or even invented. Lassnig called it “body awareness,” which sounds gentle enough until you’re in front of the paintings. They’re anything but soft. They are negotiations between sensation and representation, full of edits, ruptures, and moments where the figure seems to peel itself out of the paint in real time.
The curators made a smart decision to avoid overloading the space. Hong Kong can overwhelm quickly; here, the relative sparseness gave each canvas room to broadcast its pressure. Early works like Self-Portrait with Telephone positioned her as an artist already suspicious of realism’s promises. The body is both there and not there, rendered in zones of color rather than anatomical confidence. You sense she’s painting what she feels rather than what she sees, and sometimes the feeling isn’t particularly coherent. That incoherence is the point. Lassnig trusts it more than a mirror.
In the later paintings, especially those from the 1990s and 2000s, her humor comes through more sharply. Lassnig never moralized the body. She treated it as an unreliable narrator, a thing that could expand, shrink, sprout gadgets, or become partly machine if that’s what inner sensation demanded. Several self-portraits in the show present her aging body with a bluntness that reads as almost tender. She’s not searching for flattering angles. She’s charting terrain. The roughness of her line and the deliberate crudeness in certain passages feel like refusals to let technique overwrite lived experience.
The strongest grouping sat in the central gallery: figures floating against bare grounds, partial limbs, and faces that seem to register a distant internal weather system. In works like Woman Power and Hand with Head, the tension between vulnerability and authority is handled with surprising clarity. Lassnig paints herself as subject and object, agent and observer, without any need to resolve the contradictions. They stand because she stands in them.
Seeing this work in Hong Kong created some productive friction. Much of the local market still gravitates toward polished figuration or highly stylized abstraction. Lassnig’s paintings, by contrast, reject finish. They operate in the realm of sensation, which is far messier and more volatile. That difference gave the show its bite. It wasn’t retrospective as comfort food. It reminded viewers that honesty, especially about the self, rarely comes clean.
Overall, the exhibition offered a concise but potent argument for Lassnig’s continuing relevance. Her influence shows up everywhere now, yet encountering the originals is a bracing experience. They aren’t introspective in the therapeutic sense. They’re attempts to translate the body’s private language into something visible, and they still feel ahead of where most painters are willing to go.
Maria Lassnig (1919–2014) was an Austrian powerhouse who spent seven decades mapping a territory most artists avoid: the chaotic, internal space of the human body.
While her peers were obsessed with how the world looked, Lassnig was obsessed with how it felt to inhabit a physical frame.
The Concept: “Body Awareness”
She coined the term Körperbewusstsein (Body Awareness). She didn’t paint what she saw in the mirror; she painted the physical sensations of her own existence. If she felt a sharp pain in her shoulder or a hollow void in her chest, that became the “structure” of the painting.
The Palette: A jarring, “toxic” mix of acidic greens, bruised pinks, and fluorescent yellows. It’s the color of nerves and adrenaline.
The Form: Figures are often distorted or incomplete. If she couldn’t “feel” her left arm while painting, she simply didn’t paint it.
The Trajectory: The Ultimate Late Bloomer
For decades, the art world didn’t know what to do with her. She lived in NYC in the 70s, largely ignored while the boys played with Minimalism. Recognition finally caught up to her in her 80s and 90s. In 2013, at age 93, she won the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale—a final, defiant “I told you so” to the establishment.
