Barbara Anna Husar

“Xianglong zhaoi” - flying dragon, is the name scientists gave a lizard from the Cretaceous period discovered in China in 2007. The little winged reptile glided down from the trees on the hunt for insects 125 million years ago. Unusual creatures from ancient times are found in the work of European artist Barbara Anna Husar (b. 1975, Austria). Giant lizards are born in her studio. Mystical, archaic, and yet bright and cheerfully coloured, her living fossils are powerful ambassadors between times past and the present. For her larger-than-life acrylic paintings she employs seed and rice sacks as her canvas - a metaphor for the growth, evolution, and transformation of cultures.

Some of her creatures are hybrids between dinosaurs and architecture. “Guggosauros Bilbao Titan” is an example of this, a combination of a reptile and the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. Bones or stone, Husar is interested in both as the backbone and storage media for the most widely varied forms of life, as data media for genetic - biological and cultural - codes that constantly develop and yet at heart remain the same. Of all places, the exploding metropolis of Shanghai, whose transformation accelerated once again through the Expo 2010, offers numerous points of contact with its conjunction of ultramodern and traditional life.

As a magical mythical creature, the Chinese dragon is able to take on other forms. Why not that of a museum? For her artist-in-residence stay at stageBACK, Husar chooses as the first motif of her “Archisaurus” transformations the Shanghai Art Museum, a historic building near the People’s Square that nowadays houses Shanghais leading museum of modern art. The latest thing need not mean the elimination of the old; what is old can be filled with new, up-to-date contents, without losing its connection to its origin. The new arises from the old: Barbara Anna Husar sees her artistic activities as an umbilical cord, as a transfer of energy between times and cultures - lizards and dragons fly on the skyline of Shanghai.

Susanne Längle, 2010