Xenia Hausner: Heart Matters

The dramatic, expressionist work of Berlin-based artist Xenia Hausner intelligently captures the personal and social conflicts of both the artist and her subjects. With unflinching directness, she engages the viewer using radical color and aggressive brushstrokes. As we are drawn into Hausner's paintings, her characters reveal themselves with an abandon akin to the artist's bold and daring technique. Heart Matters 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 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. Via 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--revealing, in the process, the truths and paradoxes inherent in her life and ours.