Artworks

The painting Tragisches Duett / Dramatisches Duett (Tragic Duet / Dramatic Duet; 1987), for example, engages Lassnig’s concern with the body as well as general issues of painting and the positioning of painting in space, in both real and metaphorical terms. While the figure on the left actively reaches into space, the one on the right turns and withdraws in a nearly embryonic position. In Lassnig’s oeuvre there are other works that show the same person, the artist herself, in two or more states—thus presenting “various ways of being.” In the early 1960s, in a decisive step toward liberating her painting, Lassnig tried to come into closer contact with the canvas in order to actually experience it with her whole body. To this end she often lay directly on the picture to enable herself to interact even more directly with the support and the paint. Later she repeated this gesture in photo shoots and posed in this painting position. The figures on the cloth in Tragisches Duett may represent an idyll, or they could bear witness to some sort of confrontation. The cloth could also be a canvas in a larger room, and the figures are the pictures or the subjects. The painting’s second title, Dramatisches Duett, suggests that it is not an idyll, but that instead we are witnesses of a conflict. Is it a confrontation between two conditions, between two persons, or one with a greater entity—perhaps painting or even society? All of these things are possible, and are not contradictory, in Lassnig’s work.