Artists: Cathy Josefowitz - Maria Lassnig - Carol Rama

This summer in St. Moritz, ‘Intimate Anatomies’ brings together the work of Cathy Josefowitz, Maria Lassnig and Carol Rama, three 20th-century, trailblazing women artists whose practices undermined traditional notions of portraiture by depicting the female body as an individual and lived experience.

‘Intimate Anatomies’ for the first time unites paintings and works on paper by Lassnig and Josefowitz with works by Rama, who incorporated everyday materials such as spray paint and glue into her work. Within each of their highly unique iterations of the body, they are united by a rebellion against convention through movement, amorphousness, explorations of sexuality and their use of colour. Through their boundary-pushing depictions of the human form and psyche, the exhibition not only highlights the artists’ distinct relationship to their own body but also draws attention to the body’s relation to society, architectural space and nature.

About the artists
Prolific, prescient and powerfully original yet under-recognized in her lifetime, Cathy Josefowitz (1956 – 2014) produced a diverse body of work that ingeniously transcends hierarchies of medium and genre. Over the course of four decades, this New York-born, Swiss-raised artist created an oeuvre of remarkable ambition, spanning drawing and painting, theater and dance, as she developed a deeply personal visual syntax in her quest to represent the body as an expressive vehicle of individual experience. Josefowitz’s practice reconciled the visual arts and performance, leaving an exceptional legacy as substantial in scale as it is intimate and potent in its impact.

Maria Lassnig’s (1919 – 2014) work is based on the observation of the physical presence of the body and what she termed ‘body awareness’, or ‘Körpergefühl’ in German. Many of her paintings, drawings and watercolours were devoted to recording her physiological states through a direct and unflinching style. Utilizing contrasting colours such as greens, pinks and blues, as well as strong body shapes to give her paintings a powerful, even drastic impact, Lassnig looked to herself, a female artist in a predominantly male world, as her primary subject. ‘Hans Ulrich Obrist Archives: Maria Lassnig. ‘Living with art stops one wilting!’’ is on view at Luma Westbau until 20 December 2026. ‘Maria Lassnig and Edvard Munch. Flow of Paint = Flow of Life’ will travel from the Hamburger Kunstalle in Germany to Kunsthaus Zurich in Switzerland from 2 October 2026.

Over more than seven decades, Carol Rama (1918 – 2015) developed a radical body of work that addressed connections between desire, sacrifice, eroticism and repression. By constructing a visual cosmos where transgression leads to liberation, Rama countered assumptions about sexuality and representation, offering a retort to the societal conventions and the prevailing far-right political ideologies that defined the fascist-dominated Italy of her youth. She set neither boundaries nor hierarchies between painting, drawing, sculpture and printmaking, pulling all of these mediums into her image universe. Rama’s debut exhibition with the gallery, ‘I See You You See Me,’ is currently on view at Hauser & Wirth New York, 22nd Street until 31 July 2026.