The Brooklyn Rail

The friendship between Austrian painter Maria Lassnig (1919–2014) and curator Hans Ulrich Obrist reads like a love letter. Decades of handwritten correspondence, paired with studio visits and collaborative exhibitions, built an archive of intimacy that now anchors Living with art stops one wilting! at LUMA Arles. The exhibition’s title comes from Lassnig’s final, unfinished letter to Obrist, written days before her death in January 2014. What could have been a standard retrospective is far more personal.

Walking through LUMA’s Tower Archives gallery, the viewer sees Lassnig through the traces of this relationship. Letters written across multiple days show different pens and inks, while dummy exhibition catalogues—which she filled compulsively with drawings—sit alongside completed paintings and photographs documenting those ritual studio visits served with apple pie. This archaeology of artistic friendship shows how two minds can sustain each other over the course of several decades.

The artist’s signature “body awareness” paintings appear throughout the exhibition, rendered in what Obrist calls her investigation of internal sensation translated into external form. Her technique centered on painting from bodily feeling rather than visual observation; this allowed her to access what she described as “the micro world of the millions of neurons” in a manner that photography could never reach. This philosophical position makes the canvas a site of corporeal truth.

The exhibition’s most revelatory insight concerns Lassnig’s relationship to doubt. Obrist tells the story of how she tried to cancel her Serpentine Gallery show a week before opening, convinced her work wouldn’t hold up in the city of Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud. He had to fly to Vienna to talk her out of it. Instead of treating Lassnig’s ambivalence as personal weakness, however, Living with art frames systematic uncertainty as the foundation of her artistic methodology. Where her male contemporaries often performed confidence as cultural authority, Lassnig’s achievement lies in painting from these very states of not-knowing.

The curatorial presentation emphasizes what Obrist describes as Lassnig’s “transgression within painting.” Unlike Viennese Actionists who abandoned the medium entirely, she committed to paint on canvas while pushing its psychological possibilities. Her late work demonstrates this long-term investigation, with paintings that refuse easy categorization between figuration and abstraction, representation and sensation. To this end, contemporary artists like Amy Sillman, Precious Okoyomon, and Camille Henrot have shared tribute works that appear as posters throughout the galleries, thereby revealing how investigations of selfhood and vulnerability connect to Lassnig’s greater project. Obrist notes enthusiasm among young people, which suggests her relevance for transgenerational audiences. Unlike much confessional contemporary practice, Lassnig operated through what might be called “strategic opacity,” painting self-portraits that refuse psychological transparency in favor of bodily frankness.

Her animated films receive dedicated screening space, with Selfportrait (1971) demonstrating how she extended physical investigations into temporal dimension. The hand-drawn animation shows the artist’s face emerging from and dissolving back into gestural mark-making, existing in constant dialogue with time and change.

The archival materials, meanwhile, complicate easy distinctions between artistic work and personal artifact. When Lassnig writes to Obrist about painting’s relationship with consciousness, she simultaneously articulates intimate thoughts and aesthetic theory. Her correspondence equally serves as personal communication and manifesto in that it shows how intellectual and emotional intimacy can generate critical discourse outside institutional frameworks. The letters also document her complex relationship to photography, which she initially rejected before incorporating it into late paintings, through reference images of wrapped performers.

The exhibition includes works from her entire career, from early Surrealist influences through late explorations of mortality. Living with art stops one wilting! refuses to sentimentalize Lassnig’s struggle for recognition. Obrist describes first meeting her in 1985 after asking younger Vienna-based artists to identify figures who deserved greater recognition. They unanimously pointed to Lassnig, who at the time represented an artists’ artist. Yet the presentation also emphasizes her agency—a creative figure in constant dialogue with her own evolving consciousness, in contrast to someone simply waiting for outside validation.

Lassnig’s painted bodies, with their investigation of internal sensation, offer what painting uniquely provides: access to forms of consciousness that exist outside the realm of language and representation. Her final message to Obrist, preserved in its unfinished state, becomes both epitaph and artistic statement, or a reminder that the work of staying alive to experience never ends, even when the artist herself is gone.