Xenia Hausner


Xenia Hausner is an Austrian artist, recognised internationally as a major artist of her generation.

Life

Xenia Hausner was born into a family of artists. Her father was the Austrian painter Rudolf Hausner, her sisters are the filmmaker Jessica and the costume designer Tanja Hausner. From 1972 to 1976, she studied stage design at the Academy of Arts in Vienna and at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. From 1977 to 1992, she designed sets for theatre and opera at the Burgtheater in Vienna, Covent Garden in London, Theâtre de la Monnaie in Brussels etc.
Since 1992, Xenia Hausner has been working exclusively as a painter and has participated in innumerable exhibitions at home and abroad. She lives and works in Berlin and Vienna.

Work

Stage sets

Her first stage sets were collages built from material collected from condemned houses, junk yards and garbage dumps. She used this raw material to assemble a theatrical space that sprung to life in the clash between naturalistic clarity and abstract interpretation.

Painting

As of 1990 Xenia Hausner began concentrating on painting. People are at the center of her focus. Her images are enigmatic, the situations she depicts ambiguous. Xenia Hausner's large-formatted works are societal descriptions, the situations purposely fragmentary, snapshots from daily life. In contrast to the classical portrait, the characters in her images play the roles of people other than themselves. They are cast like actors in a play. Her style is expressive and her palette brims over with strong colours, a fact that is apparent in the flesh tones of her protagonists.
Xenia Hausner works on paper and mixed-media as well. She transforms large-formatted photos into paintings, incorporating various materials depending on the specific medium she is working in. In this way, painting and photography merge, are transported to the limits of current artistic awareness. Using a variety of techniques, she concentrates images and constructs a new reality. Producing special edition art works on hand-made paper has become a new field of experimentation for Hausner. These unique limited editions deal with subjects known from her paintings, but the images are reinvented through technique and the medium and evolve into an independent artistic form. While preparing for her exhibition, "Damage", at the Shanghai Art Museum in 2011, she became intensively interested in Asiatic, especially Chinese motifs and began incorporating them into her personal artistic DNA: clear evidence of the global networking in contemporary art.

Projects

She is active in the "Women without Borders" movement and its project SAVE, that focuses on the world, especially on people in extreme situations. She is strongly interested in architectural projects, for example the mantling of the Ringturm in Vienna in 2011, or in designing church windows.

Notable exhibitions

A selection