Iris Haeussler (or German spelling Häussler; ; born 6 April 1962) is a conceptual and installation art artist of German origin. She lives in Toronto, Canada. Many of Iris Haeussler's works are detailed, hyperrealistic installations that visitors can decode as narrative stories. Recurring topics in her work include historic, cultural, social and geographic origins; family ties, relationships, memory, history, trauma and obsession.

Biography

Haeussler studied at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich under Heribert Sturm. The loosely structured curriculum emphasized studio work. There were few mandatory courses and emphasis was placed on exploration and experiment, practice and critical discussion. Haeussler's experiments were influenced by artistic positions of Wilhelm Lehmbruck and Joseph Beuys; she herself names Medardo Rosso as her most important inspiration. Recognition received include a scholarship of the German Academic Scholarship Foundation, the Karl-Hofer Prize of the Berlin Academy of Fine Arts and a Kunstfonds Fellowship. In 1999 Haeussler had a guest professorship at the Munich Academy. She has shown widely throughout Europe in the nineties before moving to Toronto, Canada in 2001. While Haeussler was trained as a conceptual artist and sculptor, her work is not easily classified by method or genre: she has had solo-shows of sketches, drawings and sculpture as well as participatory, interactive pieces. However her most notable works are large, immersive installations. Philosopher Mark Kingwell notes: "It is an example of what we might label haptic conceptual art: the art of ideas that functions by way of immersion, even ravishment."

Major Hyper-real Installations

With her hyper-real installations, she presents the living situations of fictitious protagonists who have arranged their lives somewhere between obsession and art. "Synthetic Memories" is a tag Haeussler applies to her major installations; she sees "synthetic" as opposed to "analytic" in the artistic process of creating memory from research, ideas and studio-work. Often years in the making, they derive much of their credibility from painstaking attention to site-specific detail and hyper-realist staging. They are also invariably off-site works. Initially she adopted a strategy of erasing herself and the conventions of presenting her work as "art" by creating environments seemingly built up and then abandoned by obsessed individuals (so called outsiders). In more recent projects she includes the process of research and staging into the final presentations.

Non-fictional Art Works

Institutions

Some of Haeussler's projects include the invention of fictitious institutions or corporations that serve as a corporate identity, investigators and presenters of the discoveries before they are identified and labeled as artworks to the public..