Iris Häussler

Since 2009, Iris Häussler has produced the complete oeuvre of unknown and fictitious French painter Sophie La Rosière, who died in 1948. Furthermore, she has created an artistic persona—a heteronym—through which to channel this invented artist’s secrets.

In this wonderful fictional account of an artist’s life, Häussler fabricates a biography for La Rosière as well as an elaborate back story of a hidden erotic liaison that intersects with real people, historical events and actual artistic movements.

This project includes the recreation of La Rosière’s life circumstances, studio, its products and detritus, and the elements of a forensic investigation that tries to answer the questions, after the paintings’ discovery, of why these paintings were abandoned and what secrets they conceal.

Iris Häussler is a German-born conceptual and installation artist, who lives and works in Toronto, Canada. She consistently works with immersive installations that revolve around fictitious stories. Beginning with detailed biographies of invented characters, she builds the material evidence of their obsessive lives and works. This results in unsettling site-specific environments in domestic dwellings, historical houses and museum spaces.

The book includes a catalogue raisonné of all Sophie La Rosière’s 293 works, forensic evidence, expert analyses and official reports.