XENIA HAUSNER
TRUE LIES
![](https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0549/9813/9112/files/R0_XeniaHausner_2021_002_1024x1024.jpg?v=1651059341)
29 APRIL – 15 AUGUST 2021
The ALBERTINA MUSEUM presents the work of Xenia Hausner—one of the important contemporary Austrian painters, in a wide-ranging retrospective. Fictional visualizations play a pivotal role in the work of this artist, who was born in 1951. The present selection, entitled True Lies, points to the significance of staging as a creative and compositional principle in Hausner’s output.
![](https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0549/9813/9112/files/R2_XeniaHausner_2021_001_1024x1024.jpg?v=1651059336)
In turn, Hausner’s actual painting process is characterized by filmic and photographic methods. Her selection of motifs and fields of view, the fragmentary, the overall montage-character, the lighting implied by the colors employed—all this contributes to the atmospheric quality of these images. The scenarios created by Xenia Hausner remain puzzling and irritating. Like fragments of a story, comparable to film stills whose plot has gone missing, they defy clear interpretation.
![](https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0549/9813/9112/files/R3_XeniaHausner_2021_003_1024x1024.jpg?v=1651059329)
For the most part larger than life, in a highly characteristic and intense palette of colors applied with a broad brush, her figures, boldly three-dimensionalized, become representatives of universally valid situations and existential questions.
© Albertina Museum Vienna