Xenia Hausner at KÖNIG GALERIE
There’s a hint of Pablo Picasso’s Famille de Saltimbanques, 1905, within the dozen work right here. Rendered in broad, gestural brushstrokes utilized in cynically cheerful hues, the sober expressions worn by Xenia Hausner’s topics deviate from the brightness of every scene, very like the extreme faces of Picasso’s acrobats appear to contradict their merry garb. Take Marriage Story, 2022, with its somber couple and vague setting, which is made stranger by colourful summary types, just like the bolts of material which can be without delay draping and unnaturally geometric. The allusion to Picasso is acceptable, provided that Hausner’s conceptual queries regarding “magnificence and dread”—and the nice line between them—explicitly reference Rainer Maria Rilke, whose Fifth Elegy (of the Duino Elegies) was impressed by the Spaniard’s Rose Interval.
Hausner’s sources lengthen fittingly to common tradition as nicely. Lazy Sue, 2021, recollects Pedro Almodóvar’s Ladies on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988) in its garish portrayal of a frayed-looking lady whose nostril bleeds into her mouth as she smokes over the shoulder of a attainable lover. In With Love, Xenia, 2022, three figures hover uneasily over the image aircraft. Two clasp a wreath of roses and the opposite factors a digital camera towards the viewer, staging a posh ricochet of gazes. Hausner’s expertise in set design clearly informs her creative observe, enabling her to theatrically illustrate her concepts and to create environments by which her sitters turn out to be one thing like characters, if ones untethered from any overt story line. In 5 Pound Orange, 2022, a girl’s face, demurely turned down, is ready inside an vintage postage stamp from British Malaya, a mise-en-abyme portrait partly obscured by a gas pump and fronds of a palm tree. It’s maybe right here, on this vibrant portray shadowed by the brutality of empire, that Hausner’s fascination with magnificence and terror finds its most cogent expression.
— Sarah Messerschmidt
