Laurel Hausler

Laurel Hausler is a contemporary oil painter and sculptor with a cult following. Her work has been widely critiqued and her style compared to those of Joseph Cornell, Frida Kahlo, Edward Gorey and Francis Bacon. Her paintings reflect a woman's experience in a darkly humorous and chaotic world. Hausler worked a number of different jobs before she became a professional artist. These positions included: journalist, zookeeper and tarot card reader.

Born in Fairfax, Virginia in 1977, Hausler began to paint seriously only after living in New Orleans in the late 1990s. Her works are atmospheric, mysterious and narrative, relying heavily on imagery built upon her Catholic childhood, psychology and literature.

Influenced by the limits imposed in Catholic school and a general love of history, Hausler has developed her signature style by combining collage, found objects, drawing and painting. Though Hausler studied Literature at Gettysburg College, she declined academic artistic study and developed her own method of applying oil paint in many ghostly layers.

The artist follows a thread of expression begun by the Symbolists and continued by Expressionists such as Edvard Munch.

Hausler shows with galleries and museums across the United States, including Gallery in the Woods, located in Brattleboro, VT, and Morton Fine Art, located in the District of Columbia.

Writes curator Carol Lukitsch,

[Laurel's] unsettling...characters from history and literature/self portraits appear to be simultaneously forming and dissolving.

Painter Laurel Hausler