Work Reviewed
Review date
Publication
The Art Newspaper
Critic
Victoria Stapley-Brown

Iris Häussler, Apartment 5 (2019), Daniel Faria Gallery and John Michael Kohler Arts Center: The German artist Iris Häussler makes immersive installations about fictional characters, with complex narratives behind them. “I never pick my subjects—they pick me,” she says. At The Armory Show, she is presenting a room installation of the New York studio of the seamstress and painter Florence Hasard, a French immigrant to the US who was born in the 1880s. “We are in one chapter of a woman’s biography who was haunted by her inner ghosts of post-traumatic stress syndrome” from her time as a nurse in a military hospital during the First World War, Häussler says. The walls of the space show her “inner landscape”—a dizzying wallpapering of pages torn from antique copies of Gray’s Anatomy, with reddish map-like forms that also look like muscles, fascia or veins. Häussler has brought in the World’s Fair theme, with vintage objects from the French pavilion presented in display case outside of the room.