Maria Lassnig, Liz Larner
dal 3/2/2006 al 6/5/2006
Segnalato da
3/2/2006
Maria Lassnig, Liz Larner
Kunsthaus Graz am Landesmuseum Joanneum, Graz
Two or Three or Something
Two or Three or Something
Curated by Peter Pakesch and Adam Budak
The Exhibition Two or Three or Something investigates painterly and sculptural
vocabularies as elaborated in the work of two distinguished women artists, Austrian,
Maria Lassnig (born in 1919) and Californian, Liz Larner (born in 1960). The entire
œuvre of these two artists is a profound analysis of human psyche, executed with a
particular sensibility towards the formal
In her monumental sculptures and installations, Liz Larner depicts “the world not
just as a given… (but) as a construction" whereas Maria Lassnig in her introspective
paintings takes on an investigation into the truth of human emotions and bodily
sensations. In both cases, materials, their texture and volume as well as colours,
their significance and intensity seem to play a major role in constructing a
physical and mental space and the entire architectonics of sensuality. What links
the work of Lassnig and Larner is a very sincere attempt at overcoming a
self-portraiture as still most dominant modernist habitat of artistic mythology and
designing trajectories of subjectivity through a psychophysical network of relations
and connections. Here corporeality constitutes a universe where the cultural,
political and formal frames are being constantly questioned and redefined.
Two or Three or Something includes a selection of sculptures and installations by
Liz Larner, from her impressive installation work, Chain Perspective (1990) which
will be spectacularly reconstructed within a biomorphic geometry of the Kunsthaus
Graz, through her formal experiments of the 1990s, such as 2 as 3 and Some Too, down
to the very recent work executed in porcelain, Smiles (2005). This set will be
combined with a choice of very recent, never shown before, paintings by Maria
Lassnig, a unique summery of the artist’s approach on the edge of the figurative and
the abstract, the real and the grotesque, an evidence of her long-time concern, “the
physical event of bodily experience".
The exhibition title Two or Three or Something appropriates a title of one of the
works by Liz Larner, a sculpture which playfully rebels against modernist tradition
and dogmas that were based upon formal stability, purity and rigidity. Such a choice
expresses a major focus of this exhibition which is medium itself and its particular
specificity in an oscillation between two-dimensional, three-dimensional and
beyond-dimensional forms. It does question the rigidity of definitions and it points
out to the new interpretations of the sculptural and painterly works. It emphasizes
nuances of an applied technique which sets up a form in a constant flux and
dynamics. This is a territory of tensions where depth competes with the surface, a
density is complemented by a sense of void, and the inside is constantly challenged
by a dominant exteriority.
It is an expression of a liberation of form on the way towards hybrid, multiply
constructions. Uncanny in its playfulness and ironic in its quasi-nonchalant gesture
of openness, it brings an anxiety which productively shakes an established order and
convention. Two or Three or Something with its inert “alternativeness" suggests a
masquerade, an almost carnivalesque play with elemental forms, shapes and
personages. It brings forward a set of elements: composition, framing, elaboration
of line and colour but first of all it holds a definition of volume and density at
the core of the works of these artists.
As such Two or Three or Something is about how space is being produced and
constructed in the net of physical and mental geometries expressed in the œuvres of
Lassnig and Larner.
The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue with texts by Luce Irigaray, Penny
Florence, Russell Ferguson, John Rajchman, Adam Budak and a preface by Peter
Pakesch. It also includes full-colour images of all the works in the exhibition, as
well as installation shots.
Kunsthaus Graz am
Landesmuseum Joanneum
Lendkai 1 - Graz