Honey, You’re a Wonderful Model

Maria Lassnig uses comedy to interrogate the human experience in her cheeky hand-drawn animations.

An immersive installation of moving images, “Honey, You’re a Wonderful Model” presents Austrian artist Maria Lassnig’s (1919-2014) hand-drawn animated films from the 1970s. Lassnig’s animations are populated by a cast of zany characters, frequently including Lassnig herself, who engage in physical comedy and slapstick antics while addressing the complexities of relationships, sexuality, grief, artistic creation, and embodiment.

The exhibition, which will feature a 16mm projection, a black box theater, and a series of suspended screens, is the artist’s first solo exhibition in the Midwest since 2009 and the first exhibition in the United States dedicated to her funny and irreverent animations. Viewers will have the opportunity to see Lassnig’s films alongside eleven drawings created in New York in the 1970s and her 1975 painting “Fischbild / Einen Fisch essen (Fish Picture / Eating a Fish),” shown publicly for the first time since it was acquired by a private collection in the 1970s. Lassnig is well known as a painter of unflinching self-portraits, but she also spent a decade in New York working as an experimental and feminist filmmaker. Her animated films are a unique part of her practice in which she was not only overtly silly but also used comedy to interrogate the human experience.

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Maria Lassnig (Austrian, 1919-2014)
Selfportrait, 1971
© Maria Lassnig Foundation/Courtesy sixpackfilm