With its amorphous figure tumbling onto a field of pure blue, and without a horizon line to steady the composition, this watercolor evokes the feeling of falling. Interested in issues of perception associated with performance art but committed to painting and drawing, Lassnig has used the phrase "body-awareness painting" to describe her practice. "I certainly do not paint or draw the body as an 'object,'" she has said, "but I paint sensations of the body." The pencil smudges around the figure's facial features and genitals draw attention to the body’s receptors of feeling, heightening the work’s expression of corporeal awareness.
Gallery label from Exquisite Corpses: Drawing and Disfiguration, March 14–July 9, 2012.