Xenia Hausner ranks among the most important Austrian painters of our time. This splendid volume focuses on the aspect of stagecraft which characterizes all her works. Starting from the early paintings of the 1990s up to her moving Exiles series, the publication lures us into a female world filled with mysterious interpersonal relationships. Hausner’s painting begins in photography. The artist constructs three-dimensional settings in her studio beforehand, and records details from them, similar to film stills. Translated into painting, her images generate a dramaturgical moment of tension, in which everything seems to push towards the image that follows the one that is shown, in order to reveal its enigma. Through the staging in her works – the record of a painted lie – one experiences the contradictions of our existence and an alternative to male-dominated pictorial language.