MARIA LASSNIG

Petzel is pleased to present an exhibition of paintings and drawings by Austrian artist Maria Lassnig.

March 12 - April 25, 2026

The exhibition surveys the later stages of Lassnig’s career, spanning from the late 1980s through the early 2000s, and brings together a focused selection of works that reflect her sustained engagement with the body as a site of perception, conflict, and existential inquiry.

Continuing Petzel’s long-standing commitment to Lassnig’s work, this presentation follows the gallery’s exhibitions Maria Lassnig: The Paris Years, 1960–68 and Woman Power: Maria Lassnig in New York, 1968–1980. In contrast to those earlier examinations of her formative years abroad, the paintings and drawings in this exhibition turn to Lassnig’s later years in Vienna, where she served as a professor at the University of Applied Arts starting in 1980.

Deeply committed to her students, Lassnig found teaching demanding, requiring a shift from the studio’s solitude to the classroom’s performative dynamics. Many works from this time reflect these psychological pressures. In Durst (Thirst) (1985) and Unterwassertherapie (Underwater Therapy) (1986), she staged vulnerable, often allegorical scenarios where anthropomorphic figures appear endangered, submerged, or suspended in physical and psychic tension. Using her well-known “body awareness” painting, Lassnig painted bodily sensations as lived and felt. The degree to which visible reality informed the work varied from image to image, from phase to phase.

“Figuration comes about almost automatically, because in my art I start first and foremost with myself.”

-Maria Lassnig