XENIA HAUSNER
FREMDE IN EINER STEREOTYPEN WELT

ELBPHILHARMONIE, HAMBURG, GERMANY
16 – 24 MARCH 2024

André Heller has already crossed paths with the Austrian artist Xenia Hausner several times: most recently at the Berlin State Opera, where André Heller gave his opera debut with »Der Rosenkavalier« and thereby came upon Hausner, who worked as a set designer at the leading opera houses in London, Vienna and Salzburg. In his »Reflektor«, André Heller adds another facet to the common festival thread »Foreign is the foreigner-only in a foreign land« with Hausner’s large-scale, colourful paintings, projected gigantically onto the walls around the concerts in the Grand Hall Foyer.

 © Image by Sophie Wolter

"My subjects not only stand for migration here in the current sense but broadly for rootlessness and disconnection. I am familiar with being powerless," the artist says of her series of works entitled EXILES. Her various works were inspired, amongst other things, by the refugee movements of 2015. Images that we retained in our collective memory through the media and which the artist elaborately reconstructed beforehand in spatial settings with models in order subsequently to bring them onto canvas in oil. However, there are also her numerous works on a traditionally stereotypical world of gender roles, which convey feelings of foreignness and which have turned the artist into a pioneer of international gender art in the past three decades.

© Image by Sophie Wolter

FEATURED ARTIST

XENIA HAUSNER

Xenia Hausner (b. 1951 in Vienna, Austria) lives and works in Vienna and Berlin. She studied stage design at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. From 1977 to 1992 she was a successful set designer for international theatre and opera productions. In 1992 Hausner began focusing exclusively on her painting practice. She is also a founding member of Women Without Borders.

Hausner‘s work has been shown in numerous museum solo and group exhibitions, such as at Albertina Modern, Vienna, Austria (2023); Galleri Würth, Hagan, Norway (2023); Art Contemporani, CC Andratx, Spain (2022); Franz Gertsc...
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