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She refused to court trends in the art world, and weathered decades of rejection from the Establishment. Ultimately, she would be rewarded for sticking to her guns. "I have been working long enough to establish my own tradition, from realism through Surrealism, art informel, automatism, and I don't know how many other isms," she observed.

On her death she is remembered as one of the most significant Austrian painters of the past century, carrying on a figurative tradition that can be traced back to the Viennese artist Egon Schiele, and even – given her distinctive taste for a muted palette of pinks and blues – to the Austrian baroque. A retrospective exhibition of her work was recently held at MoMA in New York.

Maria Lassnig was born on September 8 1919 in the Carinthian town of Kappel am Krappfeld. She spent the first five years of her life at her grandparents' farmhouse, until her mother married her adoptive father, Jakob Lassnig, and they moved into an apartment above his bakery in Klagenfurt; she did not meet her biological father until she was an adult.

After education at the Ursuline Convent School, in 1939 she trained to become a primary schoolteacher but, while painting portraits of the children, her ambitions changed. In the autumn of 1941, as Austria entered the darkest hours of the Second World War, she determinedly packed a bag and rode her bicycle 300km to Vienna to take up a place at the Academy of Fine Arts, which aligned itself at the time with the realist school favoured by the Nazis.

Maria Lassnig was a technically gifted student and, bored with the representational styles encouraged by her teachers, she experimented with Expressionism and Cubism. Classified a "degenerate" by her teacher, Wilhelm Dachau, she was expelled from his class. Decades later, in 1980, she would return to the academy as a professor, the first female painting professor in the German-speaking world.

Early on in her career, Lassnig became interested in exploring the relationship between her internal world and external appearance, and in 1948 coined the term "body awareness" to describe her efforts. Even in the Fifties and Sixties, while she explored abstraction, she was still investigating the limits of the human body; her so-called "Line Pictures" from this period were painted while kneeling or lying on the canvas to restrict her arm movements.

She was offered a fellowship in Paris in 1951, and afterwards spent long periods in the French capital, where she befriended the poets Paul Celan and André Breton. In 1968 she moved to the United States, the "country of strong women", as she called it. In typically contrarian fashion, living among minimalists and conceptualists in New York inspired her to return to figurative painting. She called self-portraiture "research", as opposed to painting, and was prolific and unwavering in her investigations: there are hundreds of them. She, briefly, experimented with filmmaking too, notably Kantate (1992), in which she sings and illustrates her life story.

In 1980, Lassnig represented Austria in the 39th Venice Biennale and returned to Vienna to take up a teaching post (until 1997).

Lassnig never married or had children, a conscious decision. "The dear Lord did not gift me with beauty, but the ability to paint," she said.

Although Maria Lassnig famously tore around at great speed on her motorcycle, she was frightened of dying. The need to confront her own mortality caught up with her; her paintings became clearer, bolder and more confrontational. In her late eighties, she energetically produced work after work of startlingly youthful intensity. "Art keeps me young," she insisted.

In 2013 she was awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale.

Maria Lassnig, born September 8 1919, died May 6 2014