Painter Xenia Hausner Before Her 75th Birthday

Xenia Hausner can certainly be described as a late bloomer: The native Viennese was already in her early 40s when she discovered paint and brush for herself. Soon she was attached to this form of expression "like a dog to a bone," she once said. In the meantime, Hausner has become one of the country's most renowned painters, having made a name for herself with expressive and color-intensive portraits. On January 7, the artist celebrates her 75th birthday.

Hausner from an Artistic Family

That the celebrant would take a creative path could not really surprise many, as she was born into an artistic family in 1951. Her father was the painter Rudolf Hausner (1914-1995), a significant representative of the Vienna School of Fantastic Realism. However, the daughter initially took a different path and became a set designer after studying at the Academy of Fine Arts and the London Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. From 1977, she worked for the Burgtheater, the Salzburg Festival, or theaters in Berlin, London, and Brussels.

1992 was the year when Hausner dared to make another career restart. She swapped the big stage for the small studio. What began as a playfulness became an artistic necessity. Expressive figures in intense colors became her trademark. In 1996, her work was first shown in Berlin under the title "The Power of Images," and a year later, the Vienna Festival Weeks dedicated the exhibition "Love Fragments" to her at the Kunsthalle. In 2006, the Hausner exhibition "Lucky Break" was on display at the Kunsthaus Wien. Despite international presence from Beijing to St. Petersburg and Oslo to New York, it took until 2021 for Xenia Hausner to receive another major solo exhibition in Austria. The Albertina honored the painter for her 70th birthday - due to corona a year later than planned - under the title "True Lies" with a tribute in 42 large formats.

The then Albertina director Klaus Albrecht Schröder described Hausner's paintings as reinterpretations of the genre of historical painting. Her works were also compared to tableaux vivants or film stills. "Artists are simpletons. In the end, it's all about green, blue, and red," the image creator once commented somewhat amusedly about such attributions. In fact, Hausner stages her motifs like a director. She builds sets in her studio, arranges people in situations or settings, photographs the scenes, and gradually creates the painting based on this. For the series "Exiles," created in the 2010s, in which people press against train windows and stick their heads and hands out, the painter specifically rebuilt a train compartment with decommissioned ÖBB inventory and had her actors try out farewell poses.

Jelinek, Melles, Simonischek

As models who actually take on roles for such sessions, Hausner uses not only art students but also her half-sisters, the filmmaker Jessica and the costume designer Tanja, or well-known personalities. She portrayed, for example, Elfriede Jelinek, Sunnyi Melles, Peter Simonischek - with him she recreated a scene at her father's deathbed ("Liebestod") - or the creative jack-of-all-trades André Heller. For him, she made an exception and returned once more to her original métier when she designed the stage set for Heller's "Rosenkavalier" production at the Berlin State Opera in 2020.

Heller, in turn, as curator for the "Art Park" opened this fall at the Alte Donau and financed by Bank Austria, selected Hausner's "Atemluft" as one of 14 sculptures or sound and wind installations. The metal sculpture was previously on display in the cultural capital Bad Ischl.

Regarding the titles of her works, Hausner likes to quote from the vast (pop) cultural cosmos. They are called "Sportstück" (a work by Jelinek), "Twin Peaks" (David Lynch's cult series), or "Winterreise" (Schubert's song cycle). The latter was auctioned in 2022 for a world record price of 112,000 euros at the Kinsky auction house.

"Give No Instructions for Use"

The stories behind the painter's figure ensembles often remain diffuse. "I give no instructions for use or reading guides. Clear interpretations are boring," the artist stated on the occasion of her Albertina exhibition in 2021. However, she seems to have a mission: "Through the fiction of art, we learn to understand the world better. That's what my art is about, what all art is about."

(APA/Red)

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