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“There are painters who paint their way from one motif to another. That’s not my world. I’ m an excavator. I started digging with Hausner – that is who I discovered, found, that is who forced himself on me. I have no other motif.” (Walter Schurian, Hausner. Neue Bilder 1982-1994, (“Hausner. New Pictures 1982-1994”), Offenbach am Main, 1994, p. 20) This statement explains the birth of Adam, the artist’s alter ego, who appears in almost all of his paintings, including the “Leonardo Cycle”, which is an essential component of in Hausner’s painting cosmos. In this version, we see two images of Leonardo da Vinci’s “Last Supper” on a piece of fragile scaffolding, stacked one on top of the other behind a massive piece of arcaded architecture. At the top, a baby is lying in the arms of Christ: the artist himself, as a newborn infant. Further down, the panel mutates into a billiard table where Adam, as a child in sailor’s garb, is playing against the apostles. In front of it, two grown doubles of Adam are engaged in a boxing match. In the foreground, at the centre of the brick building, gazing at the viewer with a mild smile, is the artist’s muse, his second wife Anne as Anima-Eva. In order to be able to show the woman’s navel in the picture, the artist has increased the originally planned size of the picture by adding a wooden slat at the bottom.

In her right hand she holds a spool of thread crowned by the planet Saturn: a recurring symbol with biographical content. As a child, Rudolf Hausner, who grew up in rather poor circumstances, played with the empty spools of thread belonging to his mother, who had to earn extra money as a seamstress. In the background, a landscape illuminated by an imposing evening sky: on the right, the view across the Danube Canal to Kahlenberg, on the left, the view from Rögergasse in Vienna-Alsergrund, where Rudolf Hausner spent his childhood, to the Votivkirche. “Like a sponge, the Leonardo motif soaks up the life story” of the artist, symbols are presented like archaeological finds, “forgotten scenes of life” rediscovered. Rudolf Hausner deviates “from a customary homage and deepens it” simultaneously to create a “pictorial avowal of his individuation process.” (Schurian, p. 39 f.)

(Sophie Cieslar)