Xenia Hausner

Xenia Hausner (born 1951 in Vienna) is an Austrian painter and stage designer.

Hausner was born into a family of artists.

Her father was the Austrian painter Rudolf 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, opera and film at the Burgtheater in Vienna, Salzburg Festival, Royal Opera House Covent Garden in London, Theâtre Royal de la Monnaie in Brussels etc., as well as a stage design for a new production of Richard Strauss's opera “Der Rosenkavalier” in 2020 staged by André Heller at the Staatsoper Unter den Linden, Berlin.

As of 1990, she began concentrating on painting.

People are at the center of her focus.

Her images are enigmatic, the situations she depicts ambiguous.

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.

In addition to the dominance of female figures, fiction and invention are her central themes.

The lie that evokes the truth is her specialty and is painted, preserved and composed in images.

Hausner paints invented stories the viewer can identify with his or her own life.

Staging is also the main component of her retrospective exhibition, “True Lies” at the Albertina Museum Vienna.

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.

Since 1992, Hausner has been working exclusively as a painter.

Her works have been shown at numerous galleries, art fairs and museums.

She lives and works in Berlin and Vienna.

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.

Her favorite configuration was the oxymoron, a correlation of opposites, a concentrated unification of elements caught in centrifugal chaos.

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.

In addition to painting, photography is a major component in her work.

Hausner interlaces the history and potential inherent in both these image media in a multi-faceted manner, implicitly bringing into her painting not only the principles of photography but consolidating elements of film as well.

Hausner stages photos as a basis for painting.

She produces and directs her photographic scenarios in her studio, using one or more characters.

The choice of a cut, the sense of the fragmentary, the actual montage and the drastic staging of light according to color ultimately contributes to the intense individual atmospheric character of the image.

Hausner is active in the "Women without Borders" movement and documents through her camera women, active in the struggle against terrorism.

She is strongly interested in architectural projects, for example the mantling of the Ringturm in Vienna in 2011, or in designing church windows (Kilian Church in Heilbronn, St. Johannis Church in Gehrden, St. Johannes and St. Laurentius Cathedral in Merseburg).