Xenia Hausner

Exhibition in the Galerie Boisserée
28.04–10.06.2008
On display during the exhibition, is the illustrated book: "Xenia Hausner GlücksFall / Hide and Seek" (Prestel Verlag), to mark the occasion of the exhibitions at the LudwigMuseum in the Deutschherrenhaus, Koblenz (20.11.2005–29.01.2006) and in the KunstHausWien, Vienna (15.02.2006–14.05.2006). The book includes texts by Beate Reifenscheid-Ronnisch, Carl Aigner, Rainer Metzger and Katharina Sykora, and contains 136 pages with over 80 color images, available for Euro 39,95.
The special-edition book, with 90 numbered and signed copies, contains a signed chromolithography on hand-made paper entitled "Augenblicke", priced at Euro 243 and also available during the exhibition.
The Berlin-residing Austrian Xenia Hausner has presently taken a strong position as an internationally represented artist of figurative painting.
In addition to single-artist exhibitions in the Kunsthalle Wien and the Museum der Bildenden Künste Leipzig (1997), the Käthe-Kollwitz-Museum in Berlin and the Staatlichen Russischen Museum St. Petersburg (2000), the Rupertinum and the Museum der Moderne in Salzburg (2001), her work has been shown at various international art fairs over the last few years, including Art Cologne, Art Chicago, and Art Basel Miami (2003), Arco Madrid, Art Chicago and Art Basel (2004), as well as Art Palmbeach (2006).
Xenia Hausner's main subject is the human being. She doesn't investigate the subjects' external appearance as much as she stages intimate pairings, thereby showing real characters participating in imaginary stories. She describes experiences in human relationships – love, loneliness, longing – in a space akin to a private, painted stage, an experimental field and a place of examination, whose players enact no other role than their own self-awareness and whose audience is reduced to a single viewer. Her figures – whether classic acrylic painted on hard masonite or her painterly work on photography – are able to cast a spell on the viewer due to their sensuous intensity. The subject, appearing as in a snapshot, fades into the background.
En-route from photograph to painting, the artist achieves an enormous escalation of expressive intensity, in which the work process becomes clearly visible. In the conflicting worlds of reality and imagination, the works win an almost lyrical tone, loaning a new accent to her art.
Photography, originally the artist's visual aid for memory, was used as an "instrument" to draw on for the work process, as well as the composition of the arrangements, and finally, installed in the "vestibule" of the painting. She then emerged as an element of a partial collage in her large-scale paintings. In the most recent "mixed media" works, Xenia Hausner continues to explore the analogous relationship of Photography and Color, creating a certain tension as she sets one against the other. The overdimensional photograph becomes a stimulating subsurface for the application of color and for the painterly process that follows.
The Cologne gallery exhibition will feature the most recent work from 2006 side-by-side with a few works, shown at the artist's last two museum exhibitions, in the LudwigMuseum in Koblenz (20.11.05–29.01.06) and in the KunstHaus Wien in Vienna (15.02.06–14.05.06).