Ashley Hans Scheirl

Ashley Hans Scheirl overcomes the limitations of media as easily as she deals with gender and cultural norms. Born Angela Scheirl, the artist achieved international fame in the late 1980s for her experimental films and videos. She is now considered a trailblazer and a cult figure of the international queer and transgender artists scene. Scheirl's work examines questions about her own identity by surmounting predefined genres and classifications. Her three-dimensional installations unite paintings, spatial designs, videos, photographs, drawings, sculptures, and performance props. The artist is interested in questioning the economy and power of social conditions and the libidinal structures active in them. Ashley Hans Scheirl (*1956, Salzburg, lives in Vienna) studied restoration at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste (Academy of Fine Arts) in Vienna. She spent 1981-82 in New York, and then sixteen years in London. In 2003 she finished her post-graduate studies in fine arts at the Central Saint Martin's College of Art & Design in London. Since the fall of 2006 she has been a professor for contextual painting at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Vienna.