Maria Lassnig died on May 6, 2014, in Vienna, Austria, at the age of 94, shortly before a major retrospective at MoMA PS1.
Maria Lassnig died on May 6, 2014, in Vienna at the age of 94. Her death came just weeks after the opening of a major retrospective of her work at MoMA PS1 in New York, which cemented international recognition of her importance—recognition that, notoriously, came very late in her long career.
Lassnig worked almost until the very end of her life, continuing to paint unflinching, often disturbing self-portraits that confronted aging, illness, and mortality with the same radical honesty that had characterized her entire body of work. Her late paintings, including works depicting her own frail, aging body, are considered among the most powerful meditations on death and embodiment in contemporary art.
Her passing was widely mourned in the art world; obituaries in The Guardian Her death marked the end of a career that spanned over seven decades and fundamentally expanded the language of figurative and self-portrait painting, and institutions worldwide including Tate, MoMA, and the Guggenheim continue to celebrate and study her legacy.