Rosa Hausleithner talks to Sophie Thun about her beginnings as an artist, her time at the Academy in Bruno Gironcoli's sculpture class and how her works have developed from site-specific, sculptural-architectural interventions to painted spatial compositions.
This episode was recorded on the 7th of June, 2024 in the Secession‘s podcast studio.

Rosa Hausleithner’s polychrome pictorial spaces are primarily formed in her thoughts. As small, roughly sketched lines, they are drawn on paper with pencils and coloured pencils and then realised in acrylic on canvas. Coming from a background in sculpture, in her paintings the artist creates fictional colour spaces that deliberately defy the rules of perspective. ‘The colouring, sometimes opaque, often lucid, intensifies and/or seduces the viewing gaze to the point of imagining a tilt effect. As a result, the interplay of the various pictorial components constantly creates newly defined points of view.’ (Rosa Hausleithner on her work on the occasion of the presentation of the Gmoser Prize awarded by the Secession in 2020).

Rosa Hausleithner was born in Vienna in 1952 and completed her sculpture studies with Bruno Gironcoli at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna in 1984. She has exhibited at the Neue Galerie Graz, the Künstlerhaus Salzburg, the Secession, the Kunsthalle Krems and the Museum auf Abruf in Vienna, among others. She was on the board of the IG Bildende Kunst and a member of the advisory board of the Kulturrat Österreich. She has been a member of the Secession since 1987.

Sophie Thun (*1985, lives and works in Vienna) works primarily with analogue photography techniques, their spaces, processes and production and exhibition conditions. Thun grew up in Warsaw and completed her master’s degree at the Academy of Fine Arts in both Vienna and Krakow. Thun has been a member of the board of the Secession since 2021, where she had a solo exhibition in 2020; from 2023 to 2025 she is interim professor of the photography class at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf.

Secession Podcast: Members is a series of conversations featuring members of the Secession. 
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Jingle: Hui Ye with an excerpt from Combat of dreams for string quartet and audio feed (2016, Christine Lavant Quartett) by Alexander J. Eberhard
Editor: Paul Macheck
Production: Bettina Spörr, Jeanette Pacher
Programmed by the board of the Secession