From September 2, 2023 to January 7, 2024, UCCA presents “Maria Lassnig: Happy Martian.” The exhibition marks the first significant presentation of the work of Austrian painter Maria Lassnig (1919-2014) in China. Internationally regarded as one of the leading artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Lassnig regularly tried to paint the way her body felt, rather than how it looked. Though she lived most of her life in Austria, she spent significant periods abroad, including in Paris and New York. The exhibition features 36 paintings drawn from all periods of Lassnig’s practice along with a selection of important drawings, ranging from her early involvement with graphic abstraction to her “realist” paintings of the 1970s and her innovative late self-portraits. Organized thematically rather than chronologically, the exhibition showcases combinations of work across different decades to draw out connections in the artist’s thinking over her long career, which spanned more than seventy years. “Happy Martian” is curated by Peter Eleey, UCCA Curator-at-Large, and Antonia Hoerschelmann, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, the ALBERTINA Museum. It is organized in collaboration with the ALBERTINA Museum, Vienna, and the Maria Lassnig Foundation.

Happy Martian” unfolds across UCCA’s New Gallery and Central Gallery. Entering through the New Gallery, visitors encounter four themed rooms, the first of which looks at doubles and duality in Lassnig’s practice, from the indeterminate oscillation between interior and exterior depiction in her self-portraits, to the motif of the couple, which echoes between the almost-abstract color patches of Parents in Bed / Mum and Dad (1955) and the expressive, contorted bodies of Tragic Duet / Dramatic Duet (1987). The next room highlights the artist’s use of animal subjects in self-portraiture, whether depicting herself as an animal or posing with one, like in Taking the Bull by the Horns (2003). Influenced by philosopher Jacques Derrida, who questioned distinctions between human and animal, Lassnig deployed animal forms in her art both to express different aspects of herself and voice solidarity with creatures threatened by environmental degradation. The remaining two rooms in the New Gallery provide a broad sampling of her investigations into Body Awareness. One space features a set of drawings on paper from the 1990s, in which Lassnig imagined the interior space of her head, exploring and mapping how she processed sensations including sound and smell. While some of these drawings offered her a chance to test out ideas before expanding them into large-format paintings, others exist as works in their own right, fascinating for their immediacy and intimacy. Her paintings investigating the body, meanwhile, take an almost empirical, even quasi-scientific approach. Depicting bodies in an embryonal state, creating organic-mechanical hybrids, and displacing internal organs (as in Lady with Brain, c. 1990-1999), Lassnig sought to bring inner experience into contact with the visible, outer world.

The seduction of Lassnig’s art derives from its stunning vulnerability. Depicting herself as a monster, machine, or alien, she left her anxieties and desires uncured and in plain view. Witnessing the dawn of space exploration, Lassnig identified with this discovery of new worlds, and she envisioned herself as an astronaut and “happy Martian” on her own interior journeys in the studio. She dedicated her work to “the description of the processes inside and outside [our]selves,” emphasizing the disjunctions between her own self-image and the way she was seen by others—as a woman, as a painter, and as a person living through dramatic technological, cultural, and political developments. By bravely exposing personal traumas, fantasies, and nightmares in her paintings, she registered how the world happened to her. The result is a catalogue of allegories for the human condition that continues to deepen in its relevance.