Xenia Hausner. Lucky Break

A stroke of luck - tough luck. In her new work, Xenia Hausner constructs a fictitious reality, which she re-invents taking unexpected turns. She explores an utopia of failures and possibilities and thus comments our time.

  We see people walking on tightrope, continually imperilled by the stumbling blocks of the reality of the absurd, and we see the moments of happiness to whom they submit. In these moments, the conception of reality coincides with the concrete experience. The first nature and the second, the reflected one, are unquestioningly united for a short while. In the ideal case, the construction of the reality is identical with its nature.

In Xenia Hausner's early work we saw human beings in their strangement, now we experience them in amazingly extreme situations, their existence has been thrown off balance; what remains is their yearning. They can experience happiness, but they are always threatened by the fall into disaster. Both is unexpected. Life is an experiment.
The artist recapitulates the test arrangement and alters the procedure by her involvement in the observation.

Xenia Hauser's fame is based on pictures that involve emotionally, and whose enticing presence is not only due to the painter's skilled use of colours and seemingly scenic interiors. Her palette, partially consisting of lavish colour contrasts and a combination of different materials, has a deeper layer of fine nuances and sensitive textures of the state of mind. Her works in the last years, placing photography and painting in an exciting discourse, show an increasing number of subjects of significant works of contemporary art being integrated or the starting point of her inspiration for the image. Thus, painting becomes a medium which always asks the questions about its own conditions.

We show 40 large works of the last two years, among them about 20 large format works shown for the first time.