This exhibition took place at our previous Simchowitz Gallery location.

For Only Live Once, Flora Hauser's first exhibition at Simchowitz Gallery, the artist presents 13 works delicately rendered using combinations of graphite, coloured pencil, oil paint, and oil stick on canvas. In the minimal Variations of Circles, 2021, four interconnected rings conjoin to create an ant-like creature. Surrounding pastel pink, orange, and yellow lines and passages lend motion to the assorted discs. The more explicitly figurative Karaoke, 2021, features a man in a yellow suit enthusiastically gesturing towards a woman (the artist herself) dancing in pale pink crop tank, mini skirt, and high heels. Both are radiantly highlighted by white, which Hauser deems 'the most powerful colour.' Although the pair appear tiny amidst the primarily empty canvas, the adjacent specks and dabs of black, blue, and white paint lend the piece a sense of sway and song.

In Crossing Online, 2022, an especially layered and detail-filled painting, abstract passages of yellow, purple, pink, and green, intersperse with recognizable symbols and shapes drawn in graphite: an eye and a mouth; an upside-down pitchfork; what could be seen as a worm or a snake. The painting swirls with frenzy— the oil and graphite sections leading us around circles of data, much like life online. Life Is Live, 2022, conversely, evokes a much more natural landscape. Pistons, stalks, and petals permeate the pastel canvas, giving us the sensation of a crowded field of flowers. And the titular Only Live Once, 2022, one of the most color-saturated works in the exhibition, showcases Hauser's penchant for the feverish and intense. A caterpillar shape flies valiantly through the air on the right side of the canvas. Bold, definitive, overlapping sections, including various shades of pink, blue, and peach, along with more white underscoring, call attention to themselves, as if to say: We're alive, so let's live.

Press release courtesy Simchowitz Gallery.