--- title: "Exhibition Making LUMA Arles Hans Ulrich Obrist Archives Chapter 5 Maria Lassnig" description: "Hans Ulrich Obrist Archives Chapter 5: Maria Lassnig, Living with art stops one wilting!, LUMA Arles, 01.05.2025—05.04.2026, with Arthur Fouray." canonical: https://arthurfouray.systems/exhibition-making-luma-arles-hans-ulrich-obrist-archives-chapter-5-maria-lassnig type: ExhibitionEvent year: 2025 updated: "2026-09-26T22:46:57+00:00" license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ --- # Exhibition Making LUMA Arles Hans Ulrich Obrist Archives Chapter 5 Maria Lassnig Exhibition Making LUMA Arles Hans Ulrich Obrist Archives Chapter 5 Maria Lassnig Hans Ulrich Obrist Archives Chapter 5: Maria Lassnig Living with art stops one wilting! Apogee Graphics ( Laura Owens & Asha Schechter ) Herbert Brandl Alice Dos Reis Sheela Gowda Camille Henrot Dozie Kanu Liz Larner Maria Lassnig Renée Levi Matthew Lutz-Kinoy Mark Manders Paul McCarthy Alois Mosbacher Jill Mulleady Precious Okoyomon Hans Werner Poschauko Amy Sillman Pol Taburet Philipp Timischl Maja Vukoje 01.05.2025—05.04.2026 Co-curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist (Senior Advisor), Arthur Fouray (Curator and Archivist) in close collaboration with the Maria Lassnig Foundation With the assistance of Lucas Jacques-Witz (Archivist Assistant) LUMA Arles Living Archives Programme Arles, France https://luma.org/en/arles/whats-on/maria-lassnig Photographs: Victor & Simon , Grégoire d’Ablon ‘Living with art stops one wilting!’ Maria Lassnig , January 2014 For the fifth chapter of the Hans Ulrich Obrist Archives, LUMA Arles presents the first major exhibition in over twenty-five years in France devoted to Maria Lassnig (1919–2014). Born in rural Southern Austria in 1919, Lassnig pursued a 70-year career in the fields of painting, drawing and (animated) film. Building on the profound connection shared by Lassnig and curator Hans Ulrich Obrist , this presentation renews French audiences’ engagement with the artist’s groundbreaking oeuvre, which has shaped the history of modern and contemporary art through the concept of ‘Body Awareness’ and its feminist engagement. Her last solo exhibition in France was in 1999 in Nantes, held at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes and the Fonds Régional d’Art Contemporain des Pays de la Loire. In Lassnig ’s earlier work, expressionist and Surrealist influences were strongest, followed by Art Informel and Nouvelle Figuration, developments that shaped Lassnig ’s approach rooted in drawings and paintings driven by sensations from inside the body rather than outward appearance. Her colours vibrate, and figures seem to spring from an understanding of ‘the micro-world of the millions of neurons’, where no camera can penetrate. Celebrated as one of Austria’s most significant painters since Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka , Lassnig has been the subject of over one hundred books, and, among others, she inspired a critically acclaimed biographical film, Sleeping with a Tiger , premiered at the Berlinale in 2024, and a theatre play, Alte Meisterin. Lassnig/Beresin/Bitzan (2024). A towering figure of post-war art, she remains a vital reference for the evolution of European painting. Obrist discovered Lassnig ’s work as a child, when he acquired a postcard of one of her paintings and tucked it into his home-made ‘shoebox museum’. In 1986, at seventeen, he boarded a night train to Austria, where he first encountered Lassnig at her Maxingstrasse studio in Vienna. At the time, she taught painting and animated film at the University of Applied Arts. Lassnig introduced Obrist to the work of Austrian poet Friederike Mayröcker , prompting his exploration of Mayröcker ’s writing. Years later, concerned that Obrist might be left adrift whenever he returned to Vienna in her absence, Lassnig connected him directly with Mayröcker , who became a close friend until her passing in 2021. From 1993 until 2014, Lassnig and Obrist maintained a steady exchange of letters and frequently met in her Vienna studio. In 1993, when Kasper König invited Obrist to co-organise The Broken Mirror exhibition for the Wiener Festwochen [Vienna Festival], Lassnig ’s paintings and the film The Ballad of Maria Lassnig (1992), at the opening, emerged as a central element of that landmark painting survey. In 2000, Obrist helped Lassnig publish diaries spanning from the 1940s to 1997, revealing the depths of her artistic doubts and the evolution of her distinct Body Awareness practice. Although Lassnig was famously reluctant about formal interviews, she granted Obrist permission to film her in 1999, initiating numerous recorded conversations until 2012. Subsequently, in 2005, he collaborated with Daniel Birnbaum and Akiko Miyake on selecting Lassnig for the Safety Curtain project by museum in progress at the Vienna State Opera, a reproduction of her oil painting Frühstück mit Ohr , 1967. When Obrist joined the Serpentine in London, he mounted with Julia Peyton-Jones an ambitious show of Lassnig in 2008 at the Serpentine Gallery, supported by Maja Hoffmann . A decade later, in 2017, Obrist finalised in Athens a posthumous exhibition conceived with Maria Lassnig , centred on her passion for Greek mythology and guided by a poetic title from Friederike Mayröcker : The Future Is Invented with Fragments from the Past . Since her death, Obrist has remained close to the Maria Lassnig Foundation, serving briefly on its advisory board (since 2016) and participating in the jury of the Maria Lassnig Prize, envisioned by Lassnig before her passing to encourage artists not yet familiar to the public. For the first time in one setting, this exhibition at LUMA Arles brings together the complete video interviews between Lassnig and Obrist , accompanied by their extensive correspondence in chronological order. Among the featured works are selected paintings from The Broken Mirror and the Serpentine Gallery shows, the Vienna State Opera project, as well as paintings and watercolours presented in Athens. Alongside the biographical Ballad of Maria Lassnig , the film Selfportrait (1971) reveals her pioneering experiments in animation in the 1970s New York feminist art scene. Notably, two paintings by Lassnig were last shown in France in the 2023 exhibition Action, Gesture, Paint: Women Artists and Global Abstraction 1940–1970 at Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles, a nod to her own admiration for Van Gogh , whom she once described as an ‘expressionist god’ in a 2008 interview with Obrist . Echoing ‘Living with art stops one wilting!’, a sentence she wrote to Hans Ulrich Obrist in her last and unfinished letter on 11 January 2014, this show honours the vibrant legacy of a painter whose interior visions continue to reverberate across our bodies and souls. From the postcards of his childhood to the artists’ editions of the World Soup [ The Kitchen Show ] catalogue, and the artists’ postcards of Hotel Carlton Palace: Chambre 763 in 1993, to the projects Do It (1993–), Take Me (I’m Yours) (1995–), to the artists’ posters of Utopia Station in 2003 and the artists’ posters of the IT’S URGENT project conceived with Maja Hoffmann and produced by LUMA between 2019 and 2020, Hans Ulrich Obrist has consistently sought to invite artists to express themselves through mediums dedicated to sharing. Following the previous tributes from artists to Édouard Glissant , Agnès Varda and Gustav Metzger included in the exhibitions of Hans Ulrich Obrist Archives at LUMA Arles and LUMA Westbau (2021–2024), the fifth chapter dedicated to Lassnig presents homages from contemporary artists and designers. Acknowledgements Hans Ulrich Obrist and Arthur Fouray wish to thank Maja Hoffmann for her vision and passion for archives; and extend their gratitude to Vassilis Oikonomopoulos , Mustapha Bouhayati , Matthieu Humery , Christophe Danzin , Simon Castets , Anna von Brühl , Friedrich von Brühl and the LUMA Dream Team. First and foremost, a heartfelt thank you goes to Peter Pakesch , Chairman of the Board of the Maria Lassnig Foundation, as well as to the board members: Hans Werner Poschauko , Georg Geyer , Matthias Mühling , and Nina Zimmer ; to the Foundation team: Johanna Ortner , Elisabeth Kampfhofer , Marlene Himmer , Hoai Huong Le , and Michael Dobnig ; as well as the artists who participated in the exhibition: Apogee Graphics ( Laura Owens and Asha Schechter ), Herbert Brandl , Alice Dos Reis , Sheela Gowda , Camille Henrot , Dozie Kanu , Liz Larner , Renée Levi , Matthew Lutz-Kinoy , Mark Manders , Paul McCarthy , Alois Mosbacher , Jill Mulleady , Precious Okoyomon , Hans Werner Poschauko , Pol Taburet , Philipp Timischl , Amy Sillman , and Maja Vukoje . Our special thanks go to Lucas Jacques-Witz ; to Luz Gyalui and the LUMA Arles production team, especially Laure Breton , Juliette Kernin , Jihye Kim , Camille Lim Koun , Laura Majan , François Mallinjod and Nicolas Pène ; to Amélie Busi and the LUMA Arles communication team, Christine Denamur and Maria Luisa Rojano , for the realisation of the exhibition poster and the signage; to Luana Terrasse for coordination and Aude Ramanana-Rahary for the printing supervision. Many thanks also to Max Shackleton , Producer, and Lorraine Two Testro , Head of Operations and Planning for Hans Ulrich Obrist ; to the Serpentine team; to Melanie Nief and Atelier Walde (conservators for the Maria Lassnig Foundation), to Josef Mitter (framemaker), to hs art service austria (transport); to sixpackfilms and their team, to Jacqueline Kaess-Farquet and Olivier Martinaud ; to Sintagma, and in particular Ana Beatriz Gonçalves , Rosário Valadas Vieira , Margarida Veiga and Rita Freitas , for the subtitling of archival videos; to Jesus Plaëttner , for the mastering and audio restoration of archival videos; to Thibault Verdon and the IDzia team for the audiovisual set-up; Gilles Pennegaggi and all the exhibition installation teams; Florence Cuschieri and Laurie Dall’Ava for the condition reports; to Œil de Lynx for the wallpaper installation; Atelier SHL for the facsimile and framing, Acoplast for the signage and label elements; and finally, to all those who have participated in the development of the exhibition, including Claire Charrier , Barbara Blanc , Elif Külozü , Koo Jeong A , Adèle Koechlin , Manuella Vaney and Josh Willdigg . 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