Lucy McKenzie
14 March – 26 July 2009
Maria Lassnig
14 March – 14 June 2009
Bischofsgartenstraße 1,
D-50667 Cologne
14 March – 26 July 2009
The paintings of Lucy McKenzie, who was born in 1977, show how we can envisage an approach to painting today that goes beyond the purely aesthetic. Her large can-vases depict interiors that refer to 19th century decor designs. McKenzie arranges these paintings within the space like a stage set.
In the large top-lit gallery at Museum Ludwig, the artist will work a number of such canvases with trompe l’oeil images in to an almost seven metre long and eight metre tall wooden construction that can be accessed from both the upper balcony and the exhibition space. In this way, the tension that generates in McKenzie’s work between the applied and the fine arts, between drawing and painting, draft and almost life-size canvas is further intensified. McKenzie also demonstrates with this a logical conse-quence of her examination art and its social relevance, a question that was particu-larly important to the Arts and Crafts movement in the 19th and early 20th century. For McKenzie this also implicates the notion of the artist as worker, who appears in a self-imposed uniform suited to practical needs.
At the same time in Museum Ludwig:
Maria Lassnig
In the mirror of possibilities. Watercolours and Drawings from 1947 to Today
14 March – 14 June 2009
There are not many twentieth century artists who have managed to maintain an international reputation for decades on end. The almost 90 year-old Austrian Maria Lassnig is one of them. She has painted and drawn for over 60 years, and particu-larly her late work surprises by its freshness and expressive power.
Lassnig manages as few others have to capture her feelings on canvas and paper without becoming kitschy or maudlin. On the contrary: her sometimes serious, some-times humorous inscapes and outscapes allow the viewer to come close up and still to maintain a distance. This play between close up and far away is most easily grasped in her drawings. The exhibition in Museum Ludwig pays special attention to this highly personal and direct medium, with the aim of placing this somewhat inti-mate body of work before a larger audience.