“Body Check” at Lenbachhaus

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As a visual pairing, a sort of symmetry, sense. And also a physical feat collecting "about one hundred selected works on loan from international collections that are rarely on public display." But we get about 16 images here. And as a conceptual pairing, a goose chase, "dramatizing the female and male bodies" pretty much end the similarities. A coincidence if not a mistake.

Maria Lassnig at Kunstmuseum St. Gallen

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Everything mutant. Many explained well; Johanna Burton: "an animated approximation of the homunculus replete with all manner of magnifications and obfuscations, ostensible distortions that operate—counterintuitively, perhaps—in the name of not realism per se but perhaps something like a corporeal existentialism." or on Lassig, Paul McCarthy: "Francis Bacon does not know how to paint backgrounds."

So a note on the lighting, which Lassnig's is the cool bleaching of fluorescent "bright white." Tele-visual light. The light of the millennial gallery. Inundated enough by that coldness, the dawning of CAD and the seared product photography of contemporary art, our eyes to acclimate, so we could finally see it. Lassnig painting for years what would finally shine on it. And under the cool colors of "cheery palette of soft pinks, blues and green" there's always something yellow underneath, a lemon squeezed on metal, something pissy. A tendency for picture rot, like urine on the table despite the embalming light for your dissection. Lassnig: "The picture is very yellow, much yellower than in reproductions."


See too: Maria Lassnig at MoMA PS1

“Another Normal Love” at Barbara Gross

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In a weekend in which men's bodies exist at the fore of at least two religious holiday, it's nice a nice gesture for CAD to assert the female in its tertiary choice for religious practice.

Maria Lassnig at MoMA PS1



It’s the ones that run near amok that are best, the ones that feel just outside the border of able-to-keep-your-ducks-in-a-row.  There's a distinct level of Voyeurism involved here.
Questions remain of who is/can-be delegated the task of subjective expressions. The question gets run-off into intentions, and choice, and knowability of the subject, and is this “behaving,” and but every artist today is a well behaved one, so possibly moot.
Lassnig’s subject-object problem permutes, prescient proto-version of Sillman’s bodies-that-matter imbued formalism, and many others, Lassnig even depicting a literalized morphosis of abstract-form-subject. Borges stating the writer invents their historical influences, and maybe its the wave now that makes visible Lassnig at all.  Strange how pleasing the abstractions are and how formally-subservient-to-what-they-depict the representational are.
What’s missing here is her words used to describe the work, totally out-of-line of today’s standards.