Xenia Hausner: Heart Matters

The dramatic and expressionistic work of Berlin-based artist Xenia Hausner captures the personal and social conflicts of both the artist and her subjects with an unmatched intelligence and depth of feeling. With unflinching directness, she engages the viewer using radical color and aggressive brushstrokes. As we are drawn into her paintings, her characters reveal themselves with the same abandon that defines the artist's bold and daring technique. Heart Matters, which documents Hauser's first one-person show at the Forum Gallery, New York, showcases work that 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. In portraying the emotional lives of her subjects with such an attentive eye and heart, Hausner highlights the passion for love, desire, survival, and knowledge that still exists within our fragmented and often cold and disorienting culture. With her unique approach Hausner offers an insight into the hopes and dreams of the people she paints, enabling us to see them as figures with a past, present, and future--and in the process she reveals the truths and paradoxes inherent in her life and ours.