They will receive the Golden Lions for lifetime achievement at the 55th Venice Biennale on June 1 during the opening ceremony in Venice.

The decision has been made by the Board of la Biennale di Venezia, chaired by Paolo Baratta, following the proposal of the curator of the 55th International Exhibition, Massimiliano Gioni.

MARIA LASSNIG

Maria Lassnig was born in Carinthia in 1919 and now lives and works in Vienna.
She is one of the most significant and innovative painters on the contemporary art scene. Maria Lassnig’s œuvre embraces not only painting, but sculpture, animated film and major graphic output.
Since the early 1950s, her works have appeared in solo exhibitions, including at the Kunstmuseum in Düsseldorf (1985), the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (1994), the Centre Pompidou in Paris (1995), the Kunsthaus in Zurich (2003) and at Hauser & Wirth in London (2004).

After studying at the Vienna Fine Arts Academy, she spent some time living in Paris and New York. From 1970 to 1972 she studied film animation at the New York School of Visual Arts. On returning to Vienna in 1980, she became the first woman professor of painting in the German-speaking countries, holding the chair in this discipline at Vienna University of Applied Arts. She participated in the Venice Biennale that same year. In 1982 and 1997 her work was displayed at the Documenta in Kassel.

Her life’s work has won her many accolades, including the Grand Austrian State Prize in 1988, the City of Zurich Roswitha Haftmann Prize, the Rubens Prize of the Town of Siegen, Germany, in 2002, the City of Frankfurt Max Beckmann Prize in 2004 and the Austrian Decoration for Science and Art in 2005.


MARISA MERZ

Turin-based Marisa Merz was born in 1926 and began her career in the late 1960s.
She became known as a central figure in postwar Italian art for her earliest sculptures made of industrial materials that were shaped into organic forms.
The artist has developed a personal language in which painting, sculpture, and drawing give shape to apparently archaic and primordial images. These contemporary icons and stylized faces rise to the surface as divine apparitions. Her epiphanic paintings, as if cultivated through years in solitude, invite us to look at the world with closed eyes – as the artist suggested with the title of her 1975 exhibition, With Closed Eyes, The Eyes Are Extraordinarily Open.

Merz was awarded in 2001 the Special Prize of the Jury at the Forty-Ninth Venice Biennale, and has previously participated in the 1998 edition as well as in exhibitions at the Tate Modern in London, Documenta in Kassel, and at the Guggenheim in New York. She has had solo exhibitions at MADRE in Naples, the Stedelijk in Amsterdam, the Kunstmuseum in Winterthur, Centre Pompidou in Paris, and at Villa delle Rose in Bologna.

The 55th International Art Exhibition will take place in Venice from 1 June to 24 November 2013 at the Giardini and at the Arsenale and in various venues around the city, titled The Encyclopedic Palace and curated by Massimiliano Gioni.