Xenia Hausner. True Lies

This ALBERTINA Museum exhibition presents one of the most important Austrian painters of our time. Its main focus is on Xenia Hausner’s practice of staging, by virtue of which her oeuvre truly stands apart.

For her paintings, Hausner fist constructs spatial settings in her studio ahead of time and then photographs them. In this way, automobile-fragments or train compartments arise as places whose habitation goes without saying, with trivial everyday objects becoming co-protagonists in her peculiar scenarios. It is in these that she arranges her models. These figures separate from the original persons and assume various roles in Hausner’s narratives, which resist clear interpretation. In fragmentary montages, the artist confronts us with our own innate contradictions via aspects of ourselves that we wouldn’t choose to show to the outside world—and it is indeed precisely the fictional quality of these works that enables Hausner, with her gaze thus sharpened, to apprehend underlying truths and reveal them visually.

While it is the male gaze that characterizes art history, Xenia Hausner pursues her investigations in a puzzling counter-world where all themes are explored by women—who can assume all roles and thus mostly also play the male part.

This exhibition is conceived as a retrospective, beginning with Xenia Hausner’s initial early works from the 1990s and advancing to include her most recent series, the intensely moving Exiles.

On view from 30 April until 25 July 2021.