Iris Hauser | Grounded in the Body

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Iris Hauser, "The Birthplace of Myth and Legend," 2020

oil on canvas, 51 1/4" x 39 1/2". Courtesy of the Gallery.

Opening: Saturday, October 8, 2-4PM

Art Placement is pleased to present celebrated Saskatoon artist Iris Hauser’s first solo exhibition at the gallery, Grounded in the Body. The exhibition highlights a selection of works drawn from the last several decades of Hauser’s production with a particular emphasis on recent works from the past two years, a period that has been one of the most prolific of her accomplished and lengthy career. Throughout the selection of works, recent and past, the body dominates; an endlessly inspiring subject through which Hauser weaves a tapestry of intersecting ideas and themes.

Iris Hauser is a figurative painter who has committed herself to the subject for more than four decades. Her oil paintings combine high realism, in the tradition of the old masters, with allegory and symbolism to achieve a self-conscious, contemporary take on surrealism. Despite the realistic rendering of the figures and forms in her paintings, there is an unmistakable artificiality to Hauser’s scenes; these are not snapshots of every-day life, but intentionally composed tableaux with symbolic and allegorical heft. These paintings are constructed, in every sense of the word, using pieces of reality that are then reconfigured into something that goes beyond, reaching into the realms of spirit and intellect. This body of work places the human figure as an expressive element within recent explorations in the painter’s lexicon of colour, composition and style.