Iris Häussler

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Iris Häussler in 2006 in the installation The Legacy of Joseph Wagenbach

Iris Häussler or Iris Häußler (* 1962 in Friedrichshafen on Lake Constance) is a contemporary artist in the fields of conceptual art and installation .

Life and installations

From 1983 to 1990 Häussler studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich with Heribert Sturm. Häussler has lived and worked in Toronto, Canada, since 2001.

She works in the sculptural field in a museum context, and stages “fictional legacies” of people she invented outside of museums and galleries.

  • Her installation The Legacy of Joseph Wagenbach in Toronto, Canada in 2006 was first perceived as a reclusive artist's discovery before being disclosed as a contemporary work of art. In a house on Robinson Street, Häussler depicted the life and work of the fictional hermit Joseph Wagenbach, who was born in Germany in 1929 and immigrated to Canada and who lived in a household that was tightly woven with sculptures and drawings.
  • In 2009 the installation Honest Threads was shown in the Honest Ed’s department store in Toronto . In a stage-like boutique, the artist showed selected items of clothing from participants, which she encouraged through newspaper advertisements to make them available to visitors for the duration of the exhibition. Photos with the associated stories of the items of clothing and their wearers conveyed the special situations that these items of clothing marked for the wearer. Visitors borrowed the garments for the personal experience of “walking into someone else's shoes”.
  • From 2006 to 2011, a project entitled He Named Her Amber took place at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) in Toronto . This installation showed artifacts allegedly found in an outbuilding of the gallery during an excavation. The originator of these artefacts is said to have been an Irish maid who was employed there in the first half of the 19th century and who had the obsessive habit of rolling small finds from her everyday life in beeswax balls and closing them behind wooden walls and under floorboards throughout the building complex hide. Guided tours allowed the audience to “look over the shoulders of the archaeologists” and only when they left their tours did they receive a document from the Anthropological Services Ontario, which informed them that this was a contemporary work of art.
  • Invited to the 18th Biennale in Sydney, Australia, which was entitled “All our Relations”, in 2012 Häussler created the legacy of an employee on the small offshore island of Cockatoo Island, who for years occupied a hidden dwelling there and lost it Love traced in a strange way, which led him to create coral-like beeswax sculptures. Allegedly, the manager of a pest control company discovered this work and was drawn into this obsession with it. He Dreamed Overtime was installed in a historic building on the island, and presented without any Biennale signage.
  • Ou Topos - Abandon Trailer Project , created at the invitation of Nuit Blanche 2012 in Toronto, prompted Häussler to return to her first apartment project in Vienna in 1989 and to stage a cross-generational installation of an abandoned caravan that showed the emission of a researching, fear-obsessed young man, - bursting from the accumulation of lead-wrapped canned food and the addition of specific literature on radioactive contamination.
  • Ellen's Gift consists of the estate of a woman who was diagnosed with "hysterical blindness" in 1923 and who later designed beeswax objects based on a presumably therapeutic approach, the manufacturing process of which can be described as "inverted sculpting". This legacy, consisting of only five remaining sculptures, was shown in 2012 at SITE Santa Fe and in 2013 at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts as part of the exhibition “More Real, Art in the Age of Truthiness”.
  • The Joseph Wagenbach Foundation , founded in 2009, is Häusslers' most overarching project in the area of ​​their fictional legacies. In doing so, she transfers the work of her fictional outsider artist Wagenbach to the field of cultural estate administration.

Prices

  • 1991 Promotion Prize for Fine Arts of the City of Munich
  • In 1994 she received the Renta Prize from the Renta Group in Nuremberg.
  • In 1999 she was awarded the Karl Hofer Prize for the “Monopati” residential project .
  • Since 2006 the artist has received several grants from the Canada Council of the Arts , the Ontario Arts Council and the Toronto Arts Council .

Works in public collections or in public spaces

Exhibition catalogs

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Thomas Medicus: Robinson Street 105, Toronto In: Die Welt, July 27, 2007
  2. ↑ The Legacy of Joseph Wagenbach in Art Aspects (English)
  3. ^ Hans Dolliner: Munich in the 20th century: a chronicle of the city from 1900 to 2000 , Verlag Buchendorfer 2001, page 386
  4. ↑ Iris Häussler ...: Norishalle, 14 July - 18 September 1994, published in 1994
  5. ^ Communication from the Berlin University of the Arts
personal data
SURNAME Häussler, Iris
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Häussler, Iris
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German concept and installation artist
DATE OF BIRTH 1962
PLACE OF BIRTH Friedrichshafen