You might have found her standing or sitting or even stretched out on a canvas on the floor, downloading every bodily sensation, eyes wide shut to capture the evanescent colors inside her eyelids before she began to paint. Through these and other radical methodologies, the Austrian artist Maria Lassnig (1919–2014) channeled her perception of a moment and made the invisible visible. Just now, her art is the subject of three concurrent exhibitions: “Flow of Paint = Flow of Life,” at the Hamburger Kunsthalle; “Honey, You’re a Wonderful Model,” at the Des Moines Art Center; and “Maria Lassnig,” at Petzel, in Manhattan.
“I will not be put into one box,” said Lassnig. Like Louise Bourgeois, she did not allow a male-dominated art world to muddy her highly diverse practice, which depended on a deep exploration of self. To this day, her work resists categorization.
