XENIA HAUSNER BIO

b. 1951

Born in Vienna, Xenia Hausner was originally drawn to theatrical stage design, which she studied to great effect at both the Viennese Academy of Fine Arts and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. For fifteen years, she was in demand, creating over one hundred sets for some of Europe’s most important theatres: Covent Garden in London, the State Opera and the Burgtheater in Vienna, Berlin State Theatre, and the Théâtre de la Monnaie in Brussels. In 1992, Xenia decided to make a clean break and devoted herself full-time to painting.
 

The seeming spontaneity of her loose, masterful brushstrokes is, in fact, very carefully planned. Hausner also works on a large scale that is disconcerting to those who have only seen her work represented in the pages of books. Virtually all critiques of Hausner’s work begin with a discussion of her radiant colour and vigorous brushwork. The artist is not concerned with colour harmony, but rather colours are fighting forces, and her canvas is their battlefield. In her paintings, colour generates a dramatic, almost libidinous presence, an almost autonomous existence of its own. Donald Kuspit refers to her ‘semaphore of colour’ which has been ‘choreographed into an emotional dance’.
 

Although Hausner is not a devoted practitioner of any particular ‘school’ of painting, her robust, forceful canvases show the deep influence of the Symbolists and the original German Expressionists like Die Brücke and Die Blaue Reiter. Her obsessive interest in people has put her at the forefront of a revival of the great German portrait tradition, a tradition that had been marginalized, if not completely lost, in the latter part of the twentieth century.
 

Her years in the theatre have inspired her to take this portraiture in a new, unsentimental direction. She often searches out faces for a particular scenario she has in mind, rather like casting for the stage, and she uses colour to convey the psychological tension she perceives in her actors or characters, creating a potentially ambiguous narrative element that is up to the audience to decipher. Her subjects’ inexorably intense gaze makes direct eye contact with the viewer, challenging them in a personal, visceral way.