By Christel Rossner

Contemporary icons are her subject matter. What was erstwhile the bun with a filling taking center stage as a cultural product in Marcella Lassen’s series of works making up “Hamburger Art”, now she has moved on to portraying persons or things in western industrial societies which are revered, venerated and emulated. The MAC Museum Art & Cars recently opened their current exhibition of Marcella Lassen’s works under the title “Natural Icons”.

Marcella Lassen is intent on provoking, on moving the observer. She stages people on her canvasses, very often celebrities who seem to have walked right out of the high gloss world. But her brush reveals subtle criticism. “The world of apparent gloss and shine opens up before us, but it is subversively undermined with sublime painting techniques, occasionally even to the point of caricature” explains Siegmund Kopitzki, cultural Editor of the SÜDKURIER, who held the Laudation at the opening. Behind the superficial smiles there is also melancholy and loneliness.

The artist, however, does not intend a psychological analysis of her portrayed figures. Their faces are often numbed or frozen into a superficial expression hiding their true and inner world. “Marcella Lassen wants to call attention to another side of contemporary global existence and thus places a mirror in front of the world” continues Kopitzki. Underlying this interpretation is an understanding of art which roots in the modern era, as explained by the Laudatory in his excursus on the history of art, beginning with the pre-Christian era, extending through the evolvement of styles into the Post-Modernist phase of today.

Lassen’s figurative realism is not socially critical. Her paintings of celebrities as icons of our times offer a myriad of associations, but they do not make us into fans. Just like her other subjects, such as hamburgers, animals, landscapes, even clouds, they have all become icons of the “careening standstill” which characterizes our times, as Kopitzki puts it. “(Lassen’s figures) serve as the symbol/icon of an idea, inhabit a story, wear a message”. But the paintings are also enough unto themselves.