In that unflinching stare, she powerfully subverts the male gaze, a ubiquitous trope in the history of art. Her bodily form, with its decrepitude and partially missing facial features, reflects the artist’s staunch feminist ideas. Her work is deeply personal, yet there is a kernel of universal truth in its torrent of emotions. As noted by Carrie Moyer in Art in America (2013): “ freely hybridizes figuration with abstraction as a means toward full sensory and psychological expression, and has engendered some of the most darkly perceptive imagery of the last twentieth century.” While painting, she would often lie on the floor and close her eyes to allow the sensations she felt to inform her work. The colors, further defined by Williams as “indefinable in color as a bruise” reflect harsh, perhaps painful emotional content. ‘I want to paint things that are uncomfortable,’ said Lassnig.” Since she only depicted body parts she could actually feel while working, the result was paintings that were sometimes abstract, with grotesquely contorted and warped bodily forms. In Tate (2019), Gilda Williams perceptively states: “ paintings, drawings, and film reveal an artist who was relentlessly devoted to examining the very human sentiments of being exposed and feeling vulnerable. Looking inward not only makes her work more genuine but also gives it universal appeal her oeuvre captures what it feels like to be human. If a particular body part felt numb or was devoid of feeling, she left it out.īy focusing solely on the feelings of her body from within, Lassnig was able to boldly express her private inner sensations rather than merely her outer appearance. She dubbed her post-1948 work “body awareness paintings.” In these portraits, she illustrated sensations experienced internally by her body while painting. At the age of 92, she was awarded the Golden Lion Lifetime Achievement Award at the Venice Biennale. She received early recognition in Europe, but did not achieve international acclaim until later in her life. Lassnig, an Austrian painter whose work consisted almost exclusively of self-portraiture, had a long career that spanned 70 years. She is sitting awkwardly on the floor, yet there are no clues about the context, as she stares out against a pure white background. Portions of her head and ears seem mysteriously lopped off. The neon-green halo around the figure adds a sickening layer to an already alarming image, as if highlighting disorder and distress. The uncannily beautiful mix of pastels–greens, aqua, and beige–starkly contrasts with the terrifying content. She has a wild-eyed expression of fear, desperation, anger, and even surprise, as if the viewer has unexpectedly walked in on her. She is naked, revealing her sagging breasts and emaciated figure. No doubt, it’s a disturbing painting, overflowing with psychological tension, dread, anxiety, and seething anger. You or Me, a self-portrait completed when the artist was 85, portrays Lassnig pointing one gun at her head and another directly at the viewer. So I find myself surprised by my reaction to You or Me by Maria Lassnig (1919-2014). It was as if that experience vaccinated me against being shocked by human behavior. Though I have probably seen thousands of patients since then, the desperation that defined Room 10 still haunts me. As the psychiatrist on call, I was privy to unfathomable amounts of human suffering and torment in the form of depression, psychosis, acute manic behavior, addiction, and even a few verbal threats to then President George Bush, for which the ER was obligated to call the Secret Service. Any person who was deemed potentially dangerous, or who was agitated, was ushered into that room and I was paged. It was also the only room that could be locked from the outside. Yet it was the only ER room with padded walls, a “no sharps” policy, and a slit-like shuttered window. My initiation-by-fire was as a psychiatric resident in the early 1990s when I was on call for the infamous Room 10 of the George Washington University Hospital ER. As a psychiatrist, I am trained to perform detailed assessments of suicidal and homicidal thinking.
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