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Lot Essay
'Figuration comes about almost automatically, because in my art I start first and foremost with myself. I do not aim for the 'big emotions' when I'm working, but concentrate on small feelings: sensations in the skin or in the nerves, all of which one feels. I became interested in all this early on and tried to fix these sensations in straightforward brushstrokes, because in the body they are changing continuously. You have to be quick when painting like this, because the next minute you might not have the same feeling anymore' (M. Lassnig, '1000 Words: Maria Lassnig talks about her exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery, London', in Artforum, Summer 2008, p. 406).
Executed in 1999, Competition I is a vibrant, energetic and characteristically charged painting by Austrian artist Maria Lassnig. It depicts two footballers engaged in an athletic tussle, realised in a highly expressive and acerbic palette of crimson, mustard and blue. Perhaps surprisingly, both of these athletes are based on the figure of the artist herself, yet they are not self-portraits in the traditional sense. Rather they are meditative works, borrowing the language of sport and using Lassnig's own observations and depictions of herself in paint as an instrument of self-realization. Her canvas is white, with the backdrop to her figurative scene scarcely filled in. This is a premeditated act, for as the artist has suggested 'background creates mood and atmosphere and I don't need that' (M. Lassnig quoted in J. Wullshlager, 'Still Angry After All these Years', in Financial Times, 26 April 2008).
Born in Carinthia, Austria in 1919 Competition I was created by Lassnig at the age of eighty, yet her figures with their muscular and vigorously combative air do not betray any sense of this. Instead they distill onto canvas the artist's fervent force of character, for like her contemporaries Louise Bourgeois and Alice Neel, Maria Lassnig's work has only gained in intensity and emotive power over time. As Gilles Deleuze and Fléix Guattari once aptly concluded, 'there are times when old age produces not eternal youth but a sovereign freedom, a pure necessity in which one enjoys a moment of grace between life and death, and in which all the parts of the machine come together to send into the future a beam that cuts across all ages' (G. Deleuze & F. Guattari, 'What is Philosophy', quoted in A. Hochdörfer, '1000 Words: Maria Lassnig talks about her exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery, London', in Artforum, Summer 2008, p. 405).
In Competition I, Lassnig's scintillating palette and expressive rendering bears the traces of her long life and circuitous artistic trajectory. As she has explained, 'I have been working long enough to establish my own tradition, from realism through Surrealism, Art Informel, automatism, and I don't know how many other isms' (M. Lassnig quoted in A. Hochdörfer, '1000 Words: Maria Lassnig talks about her exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery, London', in Artforum, Summer 2008, p. 406). Attending the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna during the Second World War, Lassnig grew up knowing surprisingly little of the psychologically charged paintings of her Viennese forebearers, Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele. Instead, she was bombarded with drab, realist, 'paintings of peasants', sanctioned by the National Socialist state. In 1951, Lassnig left Austria for the first time, travelling to Paris on a scholarship. It was here that she met the surrealists André Breton and Benjamin Peret, becoming friendly with poet Paul Celan. The influence of these interactions is evident in Lassnig's brilliant composition, Competition I, yet the artist does not consider herself surrealist. Her emphasis is not on fantasy but on imagination and the real life sensations of her body. As she has explained, '[my paintings] are not inventions, because the images already exist in my head. Imagination and fantasy are very different; fantasy has nothing to do with reality, but imagination is connected to an awareness of the body as well as what you see inside your head' (M. Lassnig interview with S. Kent, 'Maria Lassnig Baring the Soul', in Art World, June-July 2008).
In 1968, Lassnig moved to New York, living there until 1980 when she returned to become Professor of Painting at the Academy for Applied Arts Vienna, a post she held for 12 years. It was during this time that she developed what she has referred to as her 'drastic painting' style, in which her characters flourish with vivid emotional distortions as seen in Competition I. Although twenty years senior to Viennese Actionists such as Hermann Nitsch and Otto Mühl, much of their raw, visceral energy is channeled into her canvases. Indeed her so-called 'body awareness painting' can be understood as the product of a type of performative act within this context.
Maria Lassnig's Competition I is a remarkable synthesis of Lassnig's expressive style, physical and emotional concerns. The figures are not heavily laboured, affected creations but pure, guttural, articulations of the artists internal sensations, her finely calibrated nervous system. As she has explained, 'figuration comes about almost automatically, because in my art I start first and foremost with myself. I do not aim for the 'big emotions' when I'm working, but concentrate on small feelings: sensations in the skin or in the nerves, all of which one feels. I became interested in all this early on and tried to fix these sensations in straightforward brushstrokes, because in the body they are changing continuously. You have to be quick when painting like this, because the next minute you might not have the same feeling anymore' (M. Lassnig, '1000 Words: Maria Lassnig talks about her exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery, London', in Artforum, Summer 2008, p. 406).
Executed in 1999, Competition I is a vibrant, energetic and characteristically charged painting by Austrian artist Maria Lassnig. It depicts two footballers engaged in an athletic tussle, realised in a highly expressive and acerbic palette of crimson, mustard and blue. Perhaps surprisingly, both of these athletes are based on the figure of the artist herself, yet they are not self-portraits in the traditional sense. Rather they are meditative works, borrowing the language of sport and using Lassnig's own observations and depictions of herself in paint as an instrument of self-realization. Her canvas is white, with the backdrop to her figurative scene scarcely filled in. This is a premeditated act, for as the artist has suggested 'background creates mood and atmosphere and I don't need that' (M. Lassnig quoted in J. Wullshlager, 'Still Angry After All these Years', in Financial Times, 26 April 2008).
Born in Carinthia, Austria in 1919 Competition I was created by Lassnig at the age of eighty, yet her figures with their muscular and vigorously combative air do not betray any sense of this. Instead they distill onto canvas the artist's fervent force of character, for like her contemporaries Louise Bourgeois and Alice Neel, Maria Lassnig's work has only gained in intensity and emotive power over time. As Gilles Deleuze and Fléix Guattari once aptly concluded, 'there are times when old age produces not eternal youth but a sovereign freedom, a pure necessity in which one enjoys a moment of grace between life and death, and in which all the parts of the machine come together to send into the future a beam that cuts across all ages' (G. Deleuze & F. Guattari, 'What is Philosophy', quoted in A. Hochdörfer, '1000 Words: Maria Lassnig talks about her exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery, London', in Artforum, Summer 2008, p. 405).
In Competition I, Lassnig's scintillating palette and expressive rendering bears the traces of her long life and circuitous artistic trajectory. As she has explained, 'I have been working long enough to establish my own tradition, from realism through Surrealism, Art Informel, automatism, and I don't know how many other isms' (M. Lassnig quoted in A. Hochdörfer, '1000 Words: Maria Lassnig talks about her exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery, London', in Artforum, Summer 2008, p. 406). Attending the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna during the Second World War, Lassnig grew up knowing surprisingly little of the psychologically charged paintings of her Viennese forebearers, Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele. Instead, she was bombarded with drab, realist, 'paintings of peasants', sanctioned by the National Socialist state. In 1951, Lassnig left Austria for the first time, travelling to Paris on a scholarship. It was here that she met the surrealists André Breton and Benjamin Peret, becoming friendly with poet Paul Celan. The influence of these interactions is evident in Lassnig's brilliant composition, Competition I, yet the artist does not consider herself surrealist. Her emphasis is not on fantasy but on imagination and the real life sensations of her body. As she has explained, '[my paintings] are not inventions, because the images already exist in my head. Imagination and fantasy are very different; fantasy has nothing to do with reality, but imagination is connected to an awareness of the body as well as what you see inside your head' (M. Lassnig interview with S. Kent, 'Maria Lassnig Baring the Soul', in Art World, June-July 2008).
In 1968, Lassnig moved to New York, living there until 1980 when she returned to become Professor of Painting at the Academy for Applied Arts Vienna, a post she held for 12 years. It was during this time that she developed what she has referred to as her 'drastic painting' style, in which her characters flourish with vivid emotional distortions as seen in Competition I. Although twenty years senior to Viennese Actionists such as Hermann Nitsch and Otto Mühl, much of their raw, visceral energy is channeled into her canvases. Indeed her so-called 'body awareness painting' can be understood as the product of a type of performative act within this context.
Maria Lassnig's Competition I is a remarkable synthesis of Lassnig's expressive style, physical and emotional concerns. The figures are not heavily laboured, affected creations but pure, guttural, articulations of the artists internal sensations, her finely calibrated nervous system. As she has explained, 'figuration comes about almost automatically, because in my art I start first and foremost with myself. I do not aim for the 'big emotions' when I'm working, but concentrate on small feelings: sensations in the skin or in the nerves, all of which one feels. I became interested in all this early on and tried to fix these sensations in straightforward brushstrokes, because in the body they are changing continuously. You have to be quick when painting like this, because the next minute you might not have the same feeling anymore' (M. Lassnig, '1000 Words: Maria Lassnig talks about her exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery, London', in Artforum, Summer 2008, p. 406).