--- title: "Exhibition Making LUMA Westbau Hans Ulrich Obrist Archives Chapter 5 Maria Lassnig" description: "Hans Ulrich Obrist Archives: Maria Lassnig, Living with art stops one wilting!, LUMA Westbau, Zurich, 13.06—20.12.2026, co-curated with Arthur Fouray." canonical: https://arthurfouray.systems/exhibition-making-luma-westbau-hans-ulrich-obrist-archives-chapter-5-maria-lassnig type: ExhibitionEvent year: 2026 updated: "2026-09-26T22:46:57+00:00" license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ --- # Exhibition Making LUMA Westbau Hans Ulrich Obrist Archives Chapter 5 Maria Lassnig Exhibition Making LUMA Westbau Hans Ulrich Obrist Archives Chapter 5 Maria Lassnig Hans Ulrich Obrist Archives: 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 13.06—20.12.2026 Artistic direction by Vassilis Oikonomopoulos (Artistic Director, LUMA Arles) Co-curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist (Artistic Director, Serpentine, London, and Senior Advisor, LUMA Arles) and Arthur Fouray (Curator and Archivist, LUMA Arles) With thanks to the Maria Lassnig Foundation for their generous support and collaboration LUMA Westbau Schwarzescafé Zurich, Switzerland https://westbau.com/en/program/maria-lassnig Photographs: Gina Folly ‘Living with art stops one wilting!’ Maria Lassnig , January 2014 LUMA Westbau presents the next chapter of the Hans Ulrich Obrist Archives, focusing on the pioneering Austrian artist Maria Lassnig (1919–2014). Born in rural Southern Austria, Lassnig pursued a 70-year career across painting, drawing, and animated film. Building on the profound connection shared by Lassnig and curator Hans Ulrich Obrist , this presentation deepens the contextual understanding of 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. In Lassnig ’s earlier work, Expressionist and Surrealist influences were strongest, followed by Art Informel and Nouvelle Figuration, developments which 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 self-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) emerged at the opening as a central element of that landmark painting survey. In 2000, Obrist helped Lassnig publish a selection of her own writings 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 [ Breakfast with Ear , 1967]. When Obrist joined the Serpentine in London, he co-curated 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 curated a posthumous exhibition in Athens, conceived with Maria Lassnig and centred on her passion for Greek mythology, guided by a poetic title by 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 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. LUMA Westbau presents, for the first time, the complete video interviews between Lassnig and Obrist , accompanied by their extensive correspondence in chronological order. Featured works include selected watercolours presented in Athens, alongside the biographical film The Ballad of Maria Lassnig (1992) and the animated film Selfportrait (1971), which reveals her pioneering experiments in animation in the 1970s New York feminist art scene. 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. The presentation is built around two sections. Animation Films follows Lassnig ’s decision, on arriving in New York, to ‘paint sensuality, but this time with the camera’: at fifty-one she enrolled on a 1971 animation course at the School of Visual Arts, and, with the commercial studios closed to her — ‘they only hired nephews and nieces’ — she worked with second-hand cameras and a telephone-cable spool for a work table, making personal experimental films on her own terms. The Future is Invented with Fragments from the Past & Greek Mythology returns to the 2017 exhibition at the Municipal Gallery of Athens, conceived in dialogue with documenta 14’s ‘Learning from Athens’ and curated by Obrist with Peter Pakesch and Denys Zacharopoulos : nearly forty works from the 1960s to the 2010s, among them twenty-two works on paper. A frequent visitor to Greece in the 1980s and 1990s, Lassnig drew on the Aegean and on myth in paintings such as Aeolus erzürnt (1982), Die Weissagerin (1983) and Meeresnymphe (1985). 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 , Anna von Brühl , Friedrich von Brühl , Mustapha Bouhayati , Christophe Danzin , Matthieu Humery , 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: Georg Geyer , Matthias Mühling , Katrin Plavčak 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 Vincent Teuscher , Pascal Häusermann , and to the LUMA Westbau team, Nico Canzoniere , Michael Lydorf , Petra Palm , Ilaria Dousse . Many thanks also to Max Shackleton , Producer, and Lorraine Two Testro , Head of Operations and Planning for Hans Ulrich Obrist ; to Sintagma, and in particular Ana Beatriz Gonçalves , Rosário Valadas Vieira and Renato Barcelos , for the subtitling of archival videos; to Jesus Plaëttner , for the mastering and audio restoration of archival videos; videocompany, for the audiovisual set-up; Kreativ WerbeTechnik GmbH for the prints, signage and label elements; and finally, to all those who have participated in the development of the exhibition, including Claire Charrier , Barbara Blanc , Julie Boukobza , Elif Külozü . Index ## Related pages - [Index](https://arthurfouray.systems/exhibition-making-index) ## Structured data ```json { "@context": "https://schema.org", "@graph": [ { "@type": "BreadcrumbList", "@id": "https://arthurfouray.systems/exhibition-making-luma-westbau-hans-ulrich-obrist-archives-chapter-5-maria-lassnig#breadcrumb", "itemListElement": [ { "@type": "ListItem", "position": 1, "name": "Arthur Fouray Systems", "item": "https://arthurfouray.systems/" }, { "@type": "ListItem", "position": 2, "name": "Exhibition Making", "item": "https://arthurfouray.systems/exhibition-making" }, { "@type": "ListItem", "position": 3, "name": "Exhibition Making LUMA Westbau Hans Ulrich Obrist Archives Chapter 5 Maria Lassnig", "item": "https://arthurfouray.systems/exhibition-making-luma-westbau-hans-ulrich-obrist-archives-chapter-5-maria-lassnig" } ] }, { "@type": "ExhibitionEvent", "@id": "https://arthurfouray.systems/exhibition-making-luma-westbau-hans-ulrich-obrist-archives-chapter-5-maria-lassnig#webpage", "url": "https://arthurfouray.systems/exhibition-making-luma-westbau-hans-ulrich-obrist-archives-chapter-5-maria-lassnig", "name": "Exhibition Making LUMA Westbau Hans Ulrich Obrist Archives Chapter 5 Maria Lassnig", "description": "Hans Ulrich Obrist Archives: Maria Lassnig, Living with art stops one wilting!, LUMA Westbau, Zurich, 13.06—20.12.2026, co-curated with Arthur Fouray.", "inLanguage": "en", "isPartOf": { "@id": "https://arthurfouray.systems/#website" }, "breadcrumb": { "@id": "https://arthurfouray.systems/exhibition-making-luma-westbau-hans-ulrich-obrist-archives-chapter-5-maria-lassnig#breadcrumb" }, "startDate": "2026-06-13", "endDate": "2026-12-20", "location": { "@type": "Place", "name": "LUMA Westbau Schwarzescafé", "address": "Zurich, Switzerland" }, "contributor": { "@id": "https://arthurfouray.systems/#arthur-fouray" } } ] } ```