From our member, Mr. Lothar Wesemann, we received the following information on the latest exhibition from his wife, Xenia Hausner:
The ALBERTINA MUSEUM presents the work of Xenia Hausner, one of the most important contemporary Austrian painters, in a wide-ranging retrospective. The present selection, entitled True Lies, focuses on fictional visualization as a creative and compositional principle in Hausner’s output. For her large-format paintings, Hausner begins by constructing elaborate spatial settings, where her figures, like actors, explore a variety of relationships.
This creative process closely interweaves painting and photography, forming a dialectic: intense color and the two-dimensionality of painting, in a sense “contradicting” the photo previously taken. The scenarios created by Xenia Hausner remain puzzling and irritating. Like fragments of a story, comparable to film stills, they defy clear interpretation.
While centuries of art history were characterized by the male gaze, Xenia Hausner situates her pictorial stories in a female counter-world. She juxtaposes stereotypical male views with strong, contradictory, and complex female figures.
Curator: Elsy Lahner www.albertina.at
Xenia Hausner www.xeniahausner.com