I am the ultimate sucker for paintings of people, especially when they are filled with vibrant color and emotion and a kind of deep feeling which makes you feel like you're looking into someone rather than at them. Xenia Hausner's work, I think, falls under this category. Born in Vienna, she spent the early part of her career designing theater, film, and opera productions. After she moved to Berlin she began to focus on painting and produced acrylic paintings that were vibrantly colored and aggressive in technique. Her work is described as "combines the energetic and unsettling style of such German artists as Otto Dix and Max Beckman with the warmth and subjective immediacy of figurative art". Hausner herself seems to be interested in telling the stories of the women she portrays and I can't help but sense strong personalities behind every painting she has. Her recent works combine photography with painting and other media and have a new depth about them which place the subjects in more contextual situations than her older paintings. Writing on some of her newer works, Hausner says "Their life histories are to be told in new ways – a fact that leads to novels that follow another course. People are still at the center of focus, their entanglements get stranger. Threads of the plot that used to run linearly get tangled in mysterious objects." Maybe the mixed media helps represent this entanglement and all that jazz. Whatever the case, I can't resist her work.
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