Demanding Co-authorship: Interpreting Xenia Hausner’s Art

Daniel Bulatov
English translation of the article in the catalogue of the exhibition “Xenia Hausner.
True lies” (Pushkin Museum, Moscow, 2021)

Interpreting the work of any artist always requires tracing the connection with
both his or her time and the historical tradition. What is the place of Xenia Hausner’s
paintings in the history of art? In what language do they address the viewer? While it
is difficult to attribute Hausner’s paintings to any previous art school, one can draw
historical parallels and study the genealogy of her technique. Today, after a hundred
years of constant redefinition of the notion of ‘artwork’, the very use of a traditional
painting technique demands a certain substantiation.

For Xenia Hausner, one such substantiation is undoubtedly her belief in the
potential of figurative painting as such. The art of her father Rudolf Hausner, a well-
known member of the so-called Vienna School of Fantastic Realism, could have cast
the foundations for her conviction. However, there is nothing in Xenia Hausner’s
oeuvre that would allow us to speak about any substantial influence of her father on
the formation of her tastes or manner of painting. Neither was her focus on painting
conditioned by the specifics of her education, as is often the case. Rather, it was
dictated by the inner necessity – the wish – that motivated a successful theatre
designer to gain more freedom and become the director of her own plays.1

It is important to note Hausner’s attachment to the texture of materials with

which easel painters work and to the effects of layering and interposing colours. In
this aspect, her art is the total opposite of the dry and graphic manner of fantastic
realists: viewers often perceive Hausner’s paintings as colourful féeries, especially
from a close distance that gives them a good glimpse of their multi-layered
character built on the contrasting apposition of colours from opposite spectra. This
is particularly true of her works of the 1990s and early 2000s such as After (1994),
Taormina (1997) or Paris Bar (2001). Let us take a closer look at the painting After (Fig.
1), which, together with its pendant work Before, make up the painter’s artistic
manifesto of sorts.

In the lower part of the painting, where the artist’s tools are depicted, a real
coloristic orgy unfolds out of combinations of orange and azure, shades of green
and carmine, dark blue and pale pink, with bright inclusions of yellow and sweeping
strokes of white that represent the tubes of paint lying on the table.

1
Cf. the interview with the artist by Sylvia Tsai. URL:
http://artasiapacific.com/Blog/LetSGetPersonalInterviewWithXeniaHausner. Accessed: 20 June 2021.
1
1. Xenia Hausner. After. 1994. Detail

The intensity of the colour palette and the active use of the principle of optical
colour mixing are all echoes of the ‘reassembly of painting’ undertaken by the
modernists. In the early period of her career as a painter, Hausner appealed to this
tradition actively and, apparently, deliberately. A striking example is her painting
Coco – a real symphony of red and all its possible shades. It would be difficult not to
see a tribute to the experiments of Henri Matisse here. However, all its flamboyance
notwithstanding, Hausner’s painting is thoroughly disciplined: she adheres to simple
compositional solutions, avoids diversity and the overabundance of detail, and
remains alien to the drama of palette knife texture or the spontaneous splashing of
paint.

In the 2010s, the artist's painting style became calmer: she began working with
a smoother stroke and softer changes of tone. However, this affected neither the
polychromy of Hausner’s compositions nor her interest in ornamental motifs: it
suffices to look at how often she includes textile patterns in her paintings. Clothing,
too, plays an important role in the mise-en-scènes created by the artist: her
characters are always brightly dressed, often in the artist's favourite colour
combination of red and blue. Generally speaking, a key aim of Hausner's work is to
intensify the viewer's experience – a task previously pursued by several generations
of 20th-century painters. It is no coincidence that in the aforementioned works
Before and After, the artist places herself against the background of colour
structures reminiscent of the paintings of Mark Rothko, who, like no one else, knew
how to express strong emotional experiences with paints. 2 The large formats
favoured by Hausner are used to attain the same goal: the figures in her paintings
are monumental and full of strength – in this respect, the artist stands in the
tradition of large-scale altar compositions, historical paintings and ceremonial
portraits.

2
Hausner has called Rothko one of her favourite artists, along with Rembrandt, Max Beckmann and Sy
Twombly. Among her contemporaries, the artist singles out the American photographer Gregory
Crewdson and the Belgian painter Michaël Borremans. See
http://www.xeniahausner.com/interview_oberhollenzer/ (accessed 20 June 2021).
2
2. Philip Pearlstein. Two Models with Four Whirly-Gigs, Bouncy Duck and Locomotive. 2008
Oil on canvas. 183 x 154 cm. Collection of the artist

3. Neo Rauch. Star. 2001

Oil on paper. 296 x 200 cm. Deutsche Bank collection at the Städel Museum

The movement in which Xenia Hausner works can be roughly described as

‘scenographic realism’. In this realism, the action unfolds in a peculiar theatrical
setting with a pre-staged mise-en-scène, arranged lighting and background
decoration. The staged nature of Hausner’s art brings her close to many
contemporary painters who value not the depiction of some kind of objective reality
but the manifold refraction of reality through the eyes of the artist and the viewer
thanks to their subjective visual, cultural and behavioural experience. In this context
we can recall Philip Pearlstein (b. 1924), an American artist who paints nudes in
sophisticated interiors with intricate furniture and other ‘Kunststücke’. The
compositional complexity of his paintings that are over-saturated with ‘materiality’
correlates with the diversity of viewers’ interpretations of the represented figures,
objects and their combinations (Fig. 2). An example of an even more complex
interplay of meanings and narratives is the work of the Leipzig artist Neo Rauch (b.
1960), in which the aesthetics of the GDR’s ‘real socialism’, the images of national
identity and the global consumer culture are intertwined in an odd way (Fig. 3). In all
these cases, one can see the total relativism and, at the same time, sincerity of post-
modernist thinking: by refusing the pretension of being ‘a window onto the world’, a
painting manifests itself as an artificial compositional and semantic construction.

However, old traditions lie behind this: on the one hand, the modernist
gesture of the early 20th century that proclaimed the self-sufficiency of the means of
artistic expression and, on the other, classical academic painting as a construct of
various studies made from nature and assembled together on canvas. Moreover, the

3
very idea of realism in painting is inextricably linked to the re-arrangement and
reassembly of reality. This principle is vividly demonstrated by Gustav Courbet’s The
Painter’s Studio (Fig. 4) – a recognized manifesto of realism. The huge canvas shows
Courbet himself in his Parisian studio surrounded by the characters of his works.
Here Courbet presents various social types, as well as his friends and the collectors
of his paintings. A skull is also visible in the studio, along with a mannequin that is
frightening in its naturalistic guise of either Christ taken down from the Cross or
Saint Sebastian tied to a pillar and pierced by arrows. A nude female model is also
here, standing behind the artist rather than posing to him; this is the muse of the
realism, albeit painted not from nature but from a photo.3 The easel in front of
Courbet supports a landscape that he paints from memory (a valley not far from his
native Ornans).4 Moreover, a kind of ghostly landscape can be seen through the
walls of the studio itself: the architecture of the painter's workshop is as illusory as
his works. Instead of capturing the physical working conditions of the artist, as his
predecessors did in their works on the same subject, Courbet presented the
speculative space of the artist's workshop. His painting became a visual metaphor of
the process of painting itself, which includes work from nature, from memory and
from photographs; its task is not to reflect the realities of life but to fuse them into a
new artistic reality.

4. Gustave Courbet. The Artist's Studio, a real allegory summing up seven years of my artistic
and moral life. 1855
Oil on canvas. 361 × 598 cm. Musée d'Orsay, Paris

3
In this and other cases, Courbet was inspired in his representation of the female nude by the
photographs of Julien Vallou de Villeneuve. Aaron Scharf was the first researcher to point to this fact (cf.
Aaron Scharf, Art and Photography. Baltimore: Penguin Press, 1974, pp. 131–133).
4
Another paradox is that the painting was created not in Paris but in a temporary studio in Ornans. Cf.
Michael Fried, Courbet's Realism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990, pp. 156–157.
4
 Realism understood as a synthesis of realities is a term that is fully applicable
to Xenia Hausner's work. It concerns not only realities brought together directly in
the field of the painting but also those existing outside it. Here we cannot avoid
mentioning the photographic process preceding Hausner’s mise-en-scène. Although
each series of photographs taken by Hausner is reworked into a single artistic image,
this image does not completely dissolve the specificity inherent to photography. In
the artist's work, you can always detect the eye of the photo camera mediating the
gaze of the painter – in her way of framing the composition, defocusing the
background or selecting an unusual point of view, as in Cage People. Unlike the
masters of the 19th century, modern painters rarely mask traces of photography in
their work. For example, some paintings by the American Neorealist Eric Fischl (b.
1948) seem to be literally pasted together from several amateur photographs
without any attempt to maintain the proportions of figures in relation to their
distance from the artist (Fig. 5).

5. Eric Fischl. Pretzel (from the series «Presence of an Absence»). 2017

Oil on canvas. 203.2 x 249 cm. Skarstedt Gallery

Another reality that is reflected in Hausner's works is the material artistic

process through which the work is born and which is usually hidden from the viewer.
Welcome (2018) clearly incorporates the conditions of the work’s creation and the
context of the studio into the structure of the painting: Hausner consciously
emphasizes that the subject of the image is precisely its staging – the train
compartment, diligently recreated from wood and cardboard. To achieve this effect,
the artist often uses a variety of patches and extensions, on which additions to the
picture are painted. In the aforementioned work Coco (2002), a wide colour stripe
with a gradient transition from yellow to black through green and blue appears in
the image field, resembling a fragment of the painter's palette (Fig. 6). In Hausner's
work abstract elements are loosely woven into the fabric of figurative narrative,
reminding viewers that what they see is just fiction, a ‘true lie’.

5
6. Xenia Hausner. Coco. 2002. Detail

The artist’s use of the titles of both well-known and relatively obscure films
and books to label her works also serves to multiply realities. Despite the fact that
the plot or characters of these works have no connection to what is happening in
Hausner's paintings, these titles provide additional food for thought for viewers who
are familiar with their source. A case in point is Shanghai Hotel, a painting named
after the novel by the Austrian writer Vicki Baum:5 its plot is based on an event
during the Sino-Japanese War of 1937-1945, when a bomb hit a hotel in the Shanghai
international settlement. Baum's novel tells the stories of nine hotel guests who were
killed by the bomb. At first glance, there seems to be nothing even remotely
reminiscent of that drama in Hausner's work: we see a sunlit wall ‘decorated’ by an
air conditioner block, colourful rags hung out to dry in the street, and an old bicycle
with vacuum bottles on the handlebars. However, the edges of the painting, which
are intentionally made of rough cardboard extensions, give a sense of the fragility of
the structure – a house of cards, which, combined with a knowledge of the plot of
Baum's book, can cause disturbing associations. Since the connection between the
book and the painting exists only at the level of the title rather than lying in the
visual plane, all comparisons and inferences are totally dependent on the viewer.

Here are some other examples of borrowed titles (in the order in which the
paintings were made): Winter Journey – a cycle of poems by Wilhelm Müller, set to
music by Schubert; Liebestod (Fig. 12) – the final aria from Wagner's opera ‘Tristan
and Isolde’; Rosemary's Baby – a thriller by Roman Polanski (1968); Puppets Bodies
Mere Machines – the title of an exhibition held in 1999 at the Art Collection of North
Rhine-Westphalia;6 Eagle and Angel – a reference to the novel by the modern writer
Juli Zeh; 7 Blind Happening – a comedy by playwright Boto Strauss (premiered at the
Burgtheater in Vienna in 2011); Pensée sauvage – a book by the French
anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss; 8 Rubber Soul – the Beatles album of 1965; Wag

5
The first edition in German: Vicki Baum, Hotel Shanghai. Amsterdam: Querido, 1939.
6
Pia Müller-Tamm and Katharina Sykora (eds.), Puppen, Körper, Automaten – Phantasmen der Moderne.
Ausst. Kat., Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, 24.7.–17.10.1999. Cologne: Oktagon, 1999.
7
Juli Zeh, Eagles and Angels. Granta Books, 2004.
8
Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind. Chicago, 1966.
6
the Dog – Barry Levinson’s comedy of 1997 starring Robert De Niro and Dustin
Hoffman; Gone Girl – a film by David Fincher (2014); Ken Park – a scandalous movie
about California teenagers by Larry Clark (2002); Dancer in the Dark – a musical
drama by Lars von Trier (2000); and Twin Peaks – an iconic television series by David
Lynch (1990–1991).

This great variety of references shows the profound rootedness of Xenia

Hausner in modern culture; both she and her works are deeply connected with our
time, in which the highbrow coexists harmoniously with the uncultivated, the elitist
coincides with the mass, and the concept of ‘classic’ is equally applicable to Wagner
and Lynch. One gets the impression that the artist sometimes uses titles not to
expand the associative field of her works but rather to help them mimic the
surrounding aesthetic environment. Even those of Hausner's titles whose origins
cannot be unequivocally established sound like possible names for popular
Hollywood melodramas: Blind Date, Pure Cool, Round Trip. It is not surprising,
therefore, that Xenia's younger sister, film director Jessica Hausner, totally
unconsciously employed the same common French expression for her film of 2014 as
the artist had done for her 2002 painting – Amour fou (Fig. 7). The plot of this film is
based on the story of the German romantic poet Heinrich von Kleist, who is
disappointed in life and seeks and eventually finds a kindred spirit – a person who is
ready to commit suicide together with him. Did the appearance of the film of the
same name affect the perception of Xenia Hausner's painting? Viewers must decide
this question for themselves.

The problem of citation, as well as the problem of the viewer's participation in

generating the meaning of a painting, brings us to the correlation between Xenia
Hausner’s work and the postmodernist discourse. Jean Baudrillard’s opinion about
contemporary painting is well known: he wrote that its entire movement ‘has pulled
out of the future and been displaced to the past’, since ‘quotation, simulation,
reappropriation’ has become the very essence of art today, and the latter has started
‘to reappropriate all forms or works of the past, near or far – or even contemporary
forms – in a more or less ludic or kitsch fashion’.9 The possibility of applying this
judgment to Hausner's work is immediately confirmed by the paintings in which the
artist directly cites the works of her contemporaries: Richard Tuttle's object in
Puppets Bodies Mere Machines, Frank Stella's volumetric abstract painting in Amour
fou, and Damien Hirst’s ‘spot painting’ and Jeff Koons' basketball floating in a clear
tank of liquid in Rosemary's Baby. However, postmodern irony is apparent only in
the last work. In the background, one sees a painting by Hirst that still seems to be in
the process of creation with preliminary markings and unfinished coloured circles
(while those that are finished are far from the perfection of execution that the British
artist requires from his assistants). The basketball has also been taken out of the

9
Jean Baudrillard, “Aesthetic Illusion and Disillusion” in The Conspiracy of Art. New York-Los Angeles,
2005, p. 111.
7
‘total equilibrium state’ in which it was supposed to stay in Koons' 1985 canonical
work.10

With the exception of this image, full of caustic sarcasm about the spectacular
properties of Neo-pop art, Hausner's paintings use the works of other artists not as
recognizable quotes but only as decorative elements – along with the neon sign
‘Paris Bar’, the Coca-Cola logo, the side of an Indian bus or the upholstery of a sofa.

7. Xenia Hausner. Amour fou (Crazy Love). 2002

Acrylic on hardboard, 200 х 350 cm. Private collection

8. Edvard Munch. Vampire in the Forest. 1916

Oil on canvas. 150 × 137 cm. The Munch Museum, Oslo

Speaking about the relation of Xenia Hausner’s work to the preceding artistic
tradition, we should note that indirect quotation plays a more significant role in the
artist’s paintings than direct citations. Such quotation may consist in a reference to a

10
The full title of the work by Koons is One Ball Total Equilibrium Tank (from the Dr J. Silver series). We
should also note that Hausner depicts the tank with water quite schematically (in the original it is quite a
solid construction) – reliability does not have any significance here.
8
particular style – for example, hard-edge painting, as in Headshot – or to the work of
an individual artist – for example, Mark Rothko, as discussed above. In the portrait of
Elfriede Jelinek O, Wilderness,11 the background evokes associations with the series
Vertical Arrangements by František Kupka, while the writer herself poses in Marcel
Breuer’s famous Model B3 chair – an iconic design of the 20th century. The
arrangement of the figures in the painting Amour fou seems to be an obvious
paraphrase of the composition that Edvard Munch used in his painting Love and Pain
(Vampire), which exists in many versions (Figs. 7-8). The compositional similarity is
reinforced by the protagonists’ red and black hair, streaming like blood. Finally, the
works from the Exiles series plastically and compositionally echo the multi-figured
canvases of old masters on religious themes. Even the thematic plan of this series –
the drama of farewell – is a motif present in a number of compositions related to the
Passion of Christ: from the Crucifixion to the Entombment. Moreover, the expression
of emotions with the help of spectacular, exalted gestures, as well as the cinematic
arrangement of characters and the processual gravity and significance with which
the sacred action unfolds – all this is present in Hausner's monumental paintings.
Squeezing the event into the frame of a train window, the artist manages to achieve
the compactness and density of space that allowed Baroque painting to attain the
highest degree of emotional intensity. The compositional organisation of Exiles 3 can
be compared, for example, with the painting Christ Falls on the Road to Calvary by
Cecco del Caravaggio (Figs. 9-10), in which the central scene slightly recedes into the
background and has greater dynamism and density in the arrangement of figures in
comparison to the flanking figures of a soldier and two thieves preceding Christ.

9. Cecco del Caravaggio. Christ Falls on the Road to Calvary. 1610–1620.

Oil on canvas, . 98 х 130 cm. Slovenská Národná Galéria, Bratislava

11
The title derives from one of Jelinek’s books: Elfriede Jelinek, Oh Wildnis, oh Schutz vor ihr. Hamburg:
Rowohlt, 1985.
9
10. Xenia Hausner. Exiles 1. 2017

Thus, the work of Xenia Hausner is not so much about reappropriation and
quotation as about the free handling of visual tropes of different artistic eras. Her
paintings elicit gradual recollections rather than immediate recognition: reading a
specific reference does not provide the viewer with an instant solution but only helps
him or her to find one of many possible vectors of interpretation. Hausner’s every
painting is an open work of art that is capable of generating ever new meanings in
the individual viewing experience. The ambivalence of artistic expression and the
atmosphere of mystery have certainly long ceased to be a novelty in painting. It
suffices to mention the army of surrealists and magical realists and, among the
artists of interest to Hausner, Max Beckmann with his own mythologies and
allegories and Edward Hopper, the poet of loneliness and melancholy. However, like
many of her contemporaries, Xenia Hausner weaves figurative and semantic codes
into her works to appeal to collective memory and visual experience. As Neo Rauch
once said in an interview, ‘the suggestive force of a painting should be such that the
viewer feels compelled to rummage about in his memory, which is pulsating with
déjà-vu moments’. 12 This approach to the image is the legacy of pop art, which
assimilated the language of mass communications and of collective fears and
desires. In this regard, one should mention the contemporary Belgian artist Luc
Tuymans (b. 1958): the disturbing power of his images lies in the unsaid and in
hidden references to specific stills from photo chronicles and films. In his case, just
as in the case of Hausner's paintings, knowledge of the original source can help one
to assess the work post factum yet, during the first encounter, is more likely to
confuse and to promote an intellectual perception while weakening the visual
impression.

12
Rosa Loy and Neo Rauch, Hinter den Gärten. Ausst. Kat. Essl Museum. Prestel: Munich, London, New
York, 2011, p. 218.
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11. Gregory Crewdson. The Basement. 2014
Digital pigment print. 114 x 146 cm. The Broad Museum, Los Angeles

12. Xenia Hausner. Liebestod (Death in Love). 1996

Acrylic on hardboard. 275.5 × 326.5 cm. Würth Collection

Paradoxically, the most important condition for the existence of narrative

painting today is the fundamental inarticulability of the plot, the lack of action and,
as a consequence, the absence of culmination. Hausner's works usually capture not
the action itself but only a hint of it: something has just happened or is about to
happen. We see a self-portrait of the artist Before and After but not during her work!
The viewer can only speculate about what remains behind the scenes and invent
stories about the characters and what unites them. In this regard, it is revealing to
recall Hausner's interest in the photographer Gregory Crewdson (b. 1962), whose
staged, extremely detailed shots in the style of Hollywood films noir and
psychological thrillers are full of mystery and a sense of timelessness: their meaning
always remains elusive, and the narrative unfinished. The atmosphere of melancholy
and painful expectation inherent in Crewdson's photographs appears, for example,
in Hausner's Liebestod (Kiss of Death) (Figs. 11-12).

However, with regard to narrative, the work of Hausner and kindred artists
continues a long historical tradition. Let us mention the aesthetic programme of
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, the theorist of the Enlightenment, who was the first to
pose the problem of conveying narrative by means of painting. In his famous essay
Laocoon, he asks how to choose the most significant episode to be depicted in a
painting, which, unlike a poetic work, is limited by the framework of one moment of
action. The most ‘fruitful’, from the point of view of Lessing, is not the image of the
culminating episode but of one that ‘leaves a free field to the imagination’: ‘to
present the uttermost to the eye is to bind the wings of Fancy’ of the viewer.13 A case
in point of the refusal to submit to the logic of the written narrative is the painting

13
G. E. Lessing. Laocoon. An Essay upon the Limits of Painting and Poetry. Newburyport: Dover
Publications, 2013, p. 16.
11
The Oath of the Horatii by Jacques Louis David, in which the artist depicts an episode
that was absent in all literary descriptions of the story of the Horatii brothers. Thus,
the viewer is forced to interpret the picture himself instead of comparing it to the
literary source. 14 Hausner's or Crewdson's attitude to storytelling differs from David's
only in that their works are not tied to a single narrative source: there is only a
decentralized system of references and paraphrases.

At the same time, in the case of Hausner we can identify another aspect that
brings her work even closer to the aesthetic views of Lessing and the Neoclassical
era in general. We are referring to emotional restraint, the inadmissibility, as Lessing
wrote, of ‘passions and degrees of passion whose expression produces the most
hideous contortions of the face, and throws the whole body into such unnatural
positions as to destroy all the beautiful lines that mark it when in a state of greater
repose.’ 15 Expression is generally alien to the faces of Hausner's characters: even in
the Exiles series, the maximum degree of emotional stress is the expression of
fatigue and discomfort from a long wait. In rejecting strong emotion such as the
scream that revoltingly disfigures the face (which Lessing specially emphasized), the
artist's work opposes expressionist tendencies in art – from the Screams of Edvard
Munch to the screaming popes of Francis Bacon.

13. Jacques Louis David, The Oath of the Horatii. 1784. Detail
Oil on canvas. 330 × 425 cm. Louvre, Paris

14. Xenia Hausner. Sleepwalking. 2019

Oil on aluminium panel. 82 × 110 cm

Moreover, one can make the cautious assumption that it is in this restraint, in
a certain timidity in expressing emotions, that the feminist message of Hausner's
work lies. Let us consider once again David’s painting The Oath of the Horatii: a

14
For a further discussion, see Emilie Sitzia, Art in Literature, Literature in Art in 19th Century France.
Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012, pp. 12–16.
15
G. E. Lessing, op. cit., p. 11.
12
group of active male figures that merge into a single whole in their sacrificial
impulse is opposed by a group of women immersed in sorrow: their eyes are closed,
and they are passive and submissive to fate (Fig. 13). In this part of the picture, the
gentle touching of heads is repeated as a refrain: in the background, the Horatii’s
mother embraces her grandchildren and presses her face to the elder's head; in the
front, Camilla (the sister of the Horatii and the bride of one of their enemies, the
Curiacii) and Sabina (the sister of the Curiacii and the wife of one of the Horatii) lean
towards each other. Hausner's paintings regularly employ the motif of two female
heads leaning towards each other (Round Trip, Dancer in the Dark, Sleepwalking –
Fig. 14) and the motif of a silent yet highly intimate and deep contact between
human beings. Such a connection between the characters of her paintings is also
expressed by an embrace or a delicate, sometimes barely noticeable touch with the
hand – as in The Oath of the Horatii, where Sabina puts her hand on Camilla's
shoulder with understanding. In David’s painting, women are united by their
experiences no less than men, but, unlike the latter, they find it difficult to overcome
inner conflict in the name of a higher goal. Women's softness of heart and their
neglect of patriotic duty were condemned in David’s day, while Hausner literally
turns this paradigm upside down: she contrasts the ‘male world’, with its loud
rhetoric and heroic pathos, with the ‘female world’, which is more complex and
permeated with reflection, caring and, of course, love. Even if male characters appear
in her paintings, they never dominate and do not demonstrate their strength, being
an organic part of this ‘female world’.

In the context of the art of the late 20th ‒ early 21st centuries, Hausner's work
also functions as an antithesis to various manifestations of ‘masculinity’. On the one
hand, her sensual, multi-layered painting opposes those artistic movements that call
for a rigid discipline of thinking and working with material ‒ be it Minimalism or
classical Conceptualism. On the other, Hausner's manner seems orderly and rational
in comparison to the figurative painting that began to revive actively in the late
1970s and early 1980s: both the rough materiality of the canvases of the School of
London artists and the sweeping intemperance of German Neo-expressionists are
equally alien to it. We can say that the artist ultimately rejects the intransigence of
modernist methods in the name of a more sensitive attitude both to the characters
of her paintings and to the viewer.

The desire to find a connection with the viewer, to be open to him or her, is
the most important aspect of Xenia Hausner's work. A key role in this process is
played by the artist’s depiction of the human body and her representation of its life,
movement and physical contacts. Indeed, the mere presence of figurative elements
in a painting does not guarantee resonance with the thoughts and feelings of the
artwork’s addressee. A simple representation of the human body is not enough for
this, either: Eric Fischl has written that, in the 1980s, most artists brought back to art,
along with figurativeness, not living bodies but surrogates of the human figure –

13
‘dolls, mannequins, cartoons’.16 It is necessary to resist this falsehood, according to
Fischl, by coming to terms with the aging of the body, its withering and, finally, its
mortality. In his understanding of corporeality, he follows such artists as Alice Neil or
Lucien Freud. Hausner’s strategy is to focus on the drama of the intense interaction
of her characters both between themselves and with the external observer. A special
role in her mise-en-scènes is assigned to piercing gazes that are primarily directed at
the viewer, drawing him or her into the space of the picture – as, for example, the
boy's gaze in Exiles 3 (Fig. 10). The gesture and facial expression of the boy looking
directly at us is nothing else than the punctum described by Roland Barthes – a prick
piercing the viewer, a disturbing detail.17 Viewers are required not only to unravel the
meaning of the painting but also to resolve their conflict with what they see. This
task can be performed only by looking inside oneself.

Xenia Hausner's work is thus an open system in which the personal experience
and perception of the viewer becomes the driving force behind the artist's pictorial
narratives. At the same time, her paintings are deeply rooted in the centuries-old
Western European artistic tradition, continuing it in some ways and opposing it in
others. It is this immersion in the historical context, together with the limitations
imposed by the painterly technique itself, which creates the interpretive framework
determining the possibility of our understanding of Hausner's work and gives us the
chance to test our imagination and our ability of co-authorship.

16
Eric Fischl, Bad Boy: My Life On and Off the Canvas. New York: Crown Publishers, 2012, p. 322.
17
Cf. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida. Reflections on Photography. New York, 1981, p. 27.
14