Xenia Hausner. True Lies

From 30 April 2021

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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 8 August 2021.

Xenia Hausner: Exiles 1, 2017 — **Image Gallery** – 13 Images

Show Photos — **Image Gallery** – 13 Images

Two women portraits divided by a red-white yardstick — Xenia Hausner | Das weibliche Maß, 2003 | Würth Collection © Bildrecht, Vienna, 2021

Women bodes lying on the ground, from a bird's eye perspective — Xenia Hausner | Crime Map, 2010 | Private Collection, Switzerland © Bildrecht, Vienna, 2021

Self-portrait of the artist with a FFP2 mask around her neck — Xenia Hausner | An Unmastered Past, 2020 | Courtesy of Xenia Hausner © Bildrecht, Vienna, 2021

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Publication

Xenia Hausner. True Lies

Xenia Hausner ranks among the most important Austrian painters of our time. This splendid volume focuses on the aspect of stagecraft – the record of a painted lie – which characterizes all her works. We experience the contradictions of our existence and an alternative to male-dominated pictorial language. Starting from the early paintings of the 1990s up to her moving Exiles series, the publication lures us into a female world filled with mysterious interpersonal relationships.

Xenia Hausner. True Lies
Ed. by Elsy Lahner und Klaus Albrecht Schröder
2020
240 pages
30 x 30 cm / hard cover
German EUR 34,90
English EUR 34,90