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Thursday 6 February

Xenia Hausner: The Staging of Truth

Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs, it’s time to talk about an artist who shatters our certainties with the subtlety of a punch in a Monet painting. Xenia Hausner, born in 1951 in Vienna, is much more than a mere Austrian painter—she’s a force of nature who transforms the canvas into a theater of the human soul.

In her pictorial universe, two major themes intertwine like threads in a complex tapestry: first, the theatrical staging of the female condition, and second, the exploration of the ambiguity between reality and fiction. These two axes plunge us into a fascinating dialogue with Simone de Beauvoir’s existentialist philosophy and Søren Kierkegaard’s concept of “subjective truth”.

Let’s start with her depiction of women. Hausner doesn’t just paint portraits; she orchestrates living tableaux where women command the space with a presence that would make Sarah Bernhardt pale in comparison. These women are not mere models; they are actresses in the grand theater of life. With colors that would make a peacock in full nuptial display green with envy—think electric cyan marrying crimson red in Kopfschuss (2000)—Hausner creates female characters that exude authenticity while being undeniably staged.

This duality takes us straight to Simone de Beauvoir and her foundational concept: “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman”. Hausner’s protagonists seem to illustrate this idea perfectly. In her monumental canvases, often exceeding two meters, women are not depicted as passive objects of contemplation but as active subjects constructing their own narratives. Take Exiles (2017), where female figures, trapped in a train compartment reconstructed in her studio, are not mere refugees—they are architects of their own stories, even within the constraints of exile.

The way Hausner handles the photographic staging prior to her paintings recalls Kierkegaard’s concept of “subjective truth”. The Danish philosopher argued that the deepest truth is the one lived subjectively rather than objectively proven. Hausner pushes this concept to its extreme limits. She literally constructs cardboard sets in her studio, photographs her models, then transforms these photographic “objective truths” into subjective explosions of color and emotion on the canvas.

This is precisely where Hausner’s genius lies: in her ability to create what I call “augmented truth”. She doesn’t just reproduce reality; she deconstructs and reconstructs it with a chromatic palette that makes a rainbow look like a black-and-white study. The faces she paints are like topographical maps of the human soul, each brushstroke revealing a new layer of emotion.

In Night of the Scorpions (1994), one of her early works featuring complex arrangements, Hausner places herself among three astrologers, all born under the Scorpio sign. This self-inclusion isn’t mere vanity—it’s a powerful philosophical statement about the nature of reality and representation. It forces us to question: where does staging end and authenticity begin? The answer, of course, is that there’s no clear boundary, just as Kierkegaard argued in his critique of pure objectivity.

Hausner’s technique is as brutally honest as a five-year-old telling you your new haircut makes you look older. Her brushstrokes are bold, almost violent at times, creating surfaces that seem to vibrate with contained energy. She applies paint in thick layers, creating textures that give her works a physical presence impossible to ignore. It’s as if she sculpts with color, giving her figures a dimensionality that transcends the flat limits of the canvas.

Her journey is as fascinating as her art. Before becoming a full-time painter in 1992, she was a set designer, creating backdrops for theater and opera across Europe. This theatrical training shines through in every one of her canvases. Her compositions aren’t mere static arrangements; they’re carefully choreographed scenes where every element plays a crucial role in the visual narrative.

Take Hotel Shanghai (2010), where fabrics and rugs suspended between two windows create a complex scenography reminding us that we are both spectators and participants in this pictorial theater. The title refers to Vicki Baum’s novel, adding an extra layer of literary significance to an already rich tapestry of visual associations.

What’s particularly remarkable about Hausner’s approach is her ability to maintain a constant tension between the artificial and the authentic. Her paintings are unmistakably staged—she makes no effort to hide it—and yet they convey an emotional truth that hits like a punch to the solar plexus. This is exactly what Kierkegaard meant by subjective truth: it’s not factual accuracy that matters but the emotional and personal resonance of the experience.

The Exiles series, created in response to the refugee crisis, perfectly illustrates this approach. Instead of directly documenting the refugees’ plight, Hausner creates a fiction that paradoxically brings us closer to the emotional truth of the experience. The people on the train don’t resemble the refugees we see in news reports—they look like us, you and me. That’s precisely what makes the work so powerful: it forces us to confront our own vulnerability, our own potential for exile.

This approach echoes Beauvoir’s thoughts on the importance of lived experience in constructing identity. The women in Hausner’s paintings are not defined by their appearance or conformity to societal expectations but by their intense presence and active engagement with their environment. They embody what Beauvoir called “transcendence,” the ability to go beyond the limitations imposed by society.

In her more recent works, such as those showcased in the Unintended Beauty exhibition (2022), Hausner continues to explore the boundaries between beauty and dread. She appropriates Rilke’s famous quote—”For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror”—and flips it on its head: in art, she suggests, terror is the beginning of beauty. This bold inversion reminds us that the most powerful art often arises from confronting what unsettles or frightens us.

Hausner’s chromatic palette deserves special mention. Her colors aren’t just vivid—they’re downright hallucinogenic. A pink that would make Matisse blush clashes with an electric blue that would make Klein look minimalist. These chromatic choices aren’t gratuitous; they serve to create what I call “emotional hyper-reality”, where feelings are amplified to become almost tangible.

Her use of photography as a preparatory step for painting is particularly intriguing. Unlike many artists who use photography as a crutch, Hausner uses it as a springboard to something greater. She begins with a reality documented photographically, then transforms it into something that transcends its source. It’s as if she takes the objective “truth” of photography and refracts it through the prism of her artistic subjectivity to create something new and truer than reality itself.

What’s fascinating about Hausner’s work is that she doesn’t seek to resolve the contradictions inherent in her approach—she celebrates them. Her paintings are both theatrical and authentic, constructed and spontaneous, personal and universal. This ability to hold opposites in productive tension is what gives her work its enduring power.

Xenia Hausner’s art reminds us that the most powerful art isn’t that which merely reflects reality but that which creates its own reality—a reality that paradoxically helps us better understand our own world. Through her elaborate stagings and explosions of color, she offers us not a mirror but a window into truths deeper than those we might find in a straightforward representation of reality.

In a world bombarded with images claiming to show “truth”, Hausner’s work reminds us that the deepest truth often lies in what is openly artificial. Her paintings don’t pretend to be transparent windows onto reality—they are unmistakably constructions, carefully crafted fictions. And it’s precisely because of this that they succeed in communicating truths that more “realistic” approaches could never hope to convey.

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