Xenia Hausner

Xenia Hausner, born in 1951, studied stage design at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. For almost two decades she worked as a stage designer for numerous theatres in Europe, including Covent Garden Theatre in London, the Burgtheater in Vienna and the Théâtre de la Monnaie in Brussels, before turning exclusively to her second passion, painting, in the early 1990s.

Today Xenia Hausner is one of the established voices of Austrian painting. Her works have been shown internationally, for example at the Shanghai Art Museum, the Hong Kong Arts Centre, the Belvedere Museum in Vienna and the Russian State Museum in St Petersburg. The artist, who has received the Ernst Barlach Prize, lives and works in Berlin and in her home city of Vienna, where in spring 2021 the Albertina dedicated its first major retrospective to her, ‘True Lies’.

Vibrant colours in large-format paintings featuring predominantly female figures in undefined spaces and ambiguous situations are characteristic of Xenia Hausner’s painting. These are enigmatic pictorial worlds, fragments seemingly taken from everyday life and fleeting snapshots, with which the artist both confronts and unsettles the viewer; the scenes are rarely clearly legible and elude unambiguous interpretation. For her compositions, Xenia Hausner photographs elaborately constructed, complex spatial settings in her studio, in which she arranges her models. Much like a play, the artist suggests a staged reality in which her figures act like actors on a stage. Xenia Hausner manages to depict the seemingly fleeting moment in such a way that the image draws attention to itself spontaneously and the indeterminate holds the viewer.