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Somewhat overshadowed by the Francis Bacon: Invisible Rooms exhibition, with which it has been jointly curated, this retrospective of the Austrian painter and filmmaker is the first to be held in the UK. Born in 1919, Lassnig came to prominence during the 1950s after visiting Paris where she first encountered the work of abstract expressionists such as Jackson Pollock. Lassnig developed her own expressionistic style in which she turned the human form into planes of oil paint, typically applied with a palette knife. Whilst, on the one hand, these experiments signal her first articulation of what she termed 'body sensation' (the shifting realisation of the human body in relation to its external environment), on the other hand, her description of these planes as 'shields' and 'cylinders' indicate both an arming and a technologisation of the body.
Moving between these two exhibitions, it soon becomes clear as to why Tate Liverpool has chosen to display Bacon and Lassnig alongside one another. Both are superb - and superbly frightening - artists of the human body, often captured in moments of distress. They express complementary trajectories in how the body was figured after the technological horrors of World War Two. Yet, whereas the breakthrough in Bacon's work, beginning with his first masterpiece Three Studies...