Xenia Hausner: heart matters

The exhibition of works by Xenia Hausner was the fourth show dedicated to works by contemporary Austrian artists at the Russian Museum. Local viewers have already seen the works by Gottfried Helnwein, Ernst Fuchs and Attersee. Xenia Hausner was born in Vienna in 1951. From 1972 to 1976, she studied theatrical design at the Academy of Fine Arts and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. Hausner then designed the sets and costumes for more than a hundred theatrical productions, including commissions for Covent Garden, Wiener Staatsoper and the Salzburg Festival. In 1992, the artist decided to dedicate herself solely to painting and now works mainly in the easel portrait genre. The exhibition at the Marble Palace showed twenty-seven of her portraits. The excessive and colourful style, direct imagery and symbolic titles of some of Hausner's canvases link her oeuvre to the classical examples of early European Modernism and the latest psycho-plastic designs of the British school of painting and the Dogma movement in cinema art.