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Last year, when I arrived in Chaoyang district, after a year-long intensive Mandarin program at Beijing Language and Culture University in Haidian district, I decided to reward myself by finally visiting or returning to the 798 District’s UCCA Center for Contemporary Art. After viewing the larger Matisse exhibition, Matisse by Matisse, I came across another ode of sorts to the late Maria Lassnig. Lassnig, was an Austrian marvel of recent history who took her practice by the horns, charting a path most women in her country had yet to follow in the mid-20^th century.

Maria Lassnig, Happy Martian, c. 1986-1999, Oil on canvas, Courtesy: Maria Lassnig Foundation, Photograph Courtesy: Jorit Aust, 2023. Private Collection, Vienna

The retrospective shines a light on her through her own words. Happy Martian, pays homage to how Lassnig undertook journeys in her own studio. With the artist’s passing in 2014, the exhibition marks a new point of evolution in her impact, as it is the first to focus on Lassnig in China with such significance. Thematically structured through sections Body Investigation, Animals, A Willing Object, and Two Ways of Being, Happy Martian, weaves through more than 70 years of the artist’s works to demonstrate the links across her career.

Maria Lassnig, Two Ways of Being (Double Self Portrait), 2000, Oil on canvas, 100.3 x 124.7 cm, Courtesy: Maria Lassnig Foundation

In the Two Ways of Being gallery, curators Peter Eleey and Antonia Hoerschelmann organized Lassnig’s works in a manner that presents her as a multifaceted human, intent on communicating her understanding of herself in relation to the greater world, and how this manifested in her work. The namesake piece, Two Ways of Being (Double Self-Portrait), 2000, depicts Lassnig and a fascinated face – similar to someone the moment before fainting from exhaustion – shoulder to shoulder with what seems to be an extraterrestrial figure. The figure is shirtless and has a fully bloomed, rose-like head, as if flowers were made of muscles and skin. Both gaze toward some awe-striking thing, and in that “stare” lies connection. Lassnig’s understanding that she is no different or more similar to this creature helps the viewer see exactly who the artist was in relation to her experiences, world, and culture. She paints herself as an alien, othered, altered woman.

Maria Lassnig, Lady With Brain, Oil on canvas, c. 1990-1999, 125 x 100 cm, Courtesy: Maria Lassnig Foundation

For instance, in Lady with Brain, c. 1990-1999, the artist shows a similar fascinated facial expression, against a sky-blue backdrop, and seemingly a huge braid on the back of her skull. Looking closer, the viewer realizes the skull is fully open and Lassnig’s brain hangs outside of it. There is something poetic about this painting that I cannot quite explain, which aligns itself with quiet insanity.

Maria Lassnig, Taking the Bull by the Horns, Oil on Canvas, 2003, 145 x 200 cm, Courtesy: Maria Lassnig Foundation

In A Willing Object, dimly lit drawings shine, showcasing an intimacy in Maria’s work. In, Animals, Lassnig portrays herself as a herder and otherworldly caretaker. Clad in an astronaut suit of sorts, we see a close up of what should be the artist leading a bull through a vague, vivid green pasture, in Taking the Bull by the Horns, 2003. If this is also a self-portrait, it suggests that Lassnig in her later life may have been persevering through something heavy, natural, and perhaps doomed – possibly a fatal diagnosis. Death is nothing easy to walk through, similarly to guiding one of nature’s more stubborn animals.

Maria Lassnig, Inside and Outside the Canvas IV, 1984-1985, Oil on canvas, 80 x 99.9 cm, Courtesy of Maria Lassnig Foundation

Body Investigation was the largest portion of the exhibition. Highlighting Lassnig’s manipulations of the body mentally and physically, the light she shines on herself is lackadaisical, lazy, mushy, and monumental. Paintings like Inside and Outside the Canvas IV, 1984-1985, made me wonder how her relationship was to her work. If it was crowding her, consuming her, or if there was a balance. What other aspects of this artist’s life contorted her perception of her otherworldly appearance, even if only by her imagination? The question begs another, if dysmorphia of the body can be depicted accurately via the imagination.

Exhibition view, Happy Martian, Courtesy: UCCA Center for Contemporary Art

Installation view, Happy Martian, Courtesy: UCCA Center for Contemporary Art

From my perspective, Maria shaped her inner world on the canvas. Those complex, unhinged, uninhibited urges that are felt as a woman – which might otherwise be shunned – were vividly produced throughout her tenure, and stand here in the gallery. To be on the brink of this in the mid-20^th century speaks volumes of her own understanding of self and how even in the chaos of the ending of a World War, moving through Europe, and forging a path for Austrian women, she embraced and trusted her intuition. I feel it is a triumph to know that her work has been revered in such a tender manner, even if for the first time here in Beijing.

Happy Martian was on view at the UCCA Center for Contemporary Art from September 2, 2023 through January 7, 2024.

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