Mari Lassnig
Serpentine Gallery, until 8 June
Alison Watt: Phantom
National Gallery, until 29 June
When I first saw the card for Maria Lassnig’s show I thought it was just another young or middle-aged artist trying it on. Then I discovered that Lassnig was born in 1919, and I wanted to know more. Had she always painted with this level of crude energy? Was her naive expressionist brushwork developed and refined over a lifetime? Unfortunately, it’s impossible to tell from her current solo show (the first of her work in Britain). Far from being anything like a retrospective survey — or indeed an introduction to an unknown artist — the work has been restricted to paintings produced in the past eight or nine years. The exception is in the selection of short animated films running on a screen in the foyer which mostly date from the 1970s.
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