“I do remember when … I got the idea of painting the way I feel at a given moment,” the lauded Austrian artist Maria Lassnig once said of her interest in Körpergefühl (body sensation) and Körperbewusstsein (body awareness), terms she coined to describe her art. “I was sitting in a chair and felt it pressing against me. I still have the drawings where I depicted the sensation of sitting.” This was the 1960s, and thereafter, Lassnig would frequently sit or lie on her canvases to paint her psychologically charged figurative works, which give form to feeling like few others. This is her in her studio in 1983, captured by Kurt-Michael Westerman.
