XENIA HAUSNER

Xenia Hausner explores the question of beauty. Her latest show comprises twelve new paintings by the Berlin- and Vienna-based artist and is entitled UNINTENDED BEAUTY. Hausner looks at how beauty and the coincidental combine in contemporary art. But underpinning her current exhibition is also the question of how beauty and horror relate to each other. The distinction between them is fluid. ‘Every angel is terrifying,’ says the often-cited line from Rilke’s Duino Elegies (1912–1922). ‘For beauty is nothing but the start of terror, that we are still able to bear, and we revere it so, because it calmly disdains to destroy us.’ Hauser adapts Rilke’s words for her own purposes, suggesting that ‘in art, terror is nothing but the start of beauty’. From the apocalyptic murmurings there suddenly rises a glimmer of hope; prophecies of destruction are countered with the inventiveness and power of art.

Chance moments are written into Hausner’s art alongside conscious mises-en-scène. But Hausner–who uses photography and interior settings to produce her art–does not set out to distort her co-actors. Quite the opposite, in fact: the artist says that she attaches great importance to \the figures retaining their authentic body language’. Yet at the same time, Hausner adds, the people she paints are also ‘like actors playing a part in my stor’. The traditional, subtle power relations between painter and subject, then, become a bi-directional exchange, with each side revealing aspects of themselves. ‘Painting has to do with affection,’ says Hausner. Her images, painted in acrylics and oils on Dibond sheet, show her particular interest in composition, light and the power of colours. Thus, even supposedly secular subjects, such as buoys in a harbour basin, or politically representative, highly charged image media such as postage stamps can become a playing field for painterly and social questions. They are dropped like anchors into the depths of a semi-conscious story that may contain elements of autobiographical scenes, or ‘questionable idylls’, as the artist calls them.

UNINTENDED BEAUTY poses a contradiction to our zeitgeist, as Hausner’s pictures hold on to beauty. Subjected to affirmative slickness, says the philosopher Byung-Chul Han, beauty is useless to art, because art needs friction and negativity. The cultural critic Laurie Penny commented on the toxic-normative core underlying this slickness quite some time ago, saying that every day, women are bombarded by films, TV, ads, print media and even fleeting encounters and their more or less subtle messages that they are not young, slim, light-skinned or submissive enough. And yet the actors in Hausner’s predominantly female cosmos appear to represent a counter-world that draws its aesthetic power from everyday reality. They are depicted as confident and fully occupying the space. So, could this be a way of defending beauty through the medium of art? These paintings are dialectically close to reality but also utopian.

Press release courtesy König Galerie. Text: Kito Nedo