Installation View, Elizabeth Hazan, "Double Fantasy", 2026, HESSE FLATOW, New York. Courtesy of the artist and HESSE FLATOW, New York. Photo: ©Jenny Gorman.
HESSE FLATOW presents Double Fantasy, a solo exhibition of new paintings by New York–based artist Elizabeth Hazan. In this recent body of work, Hazan continues her exploration of landscape as a fluid, imaginative space—one shaped as much by memory and sensation as by observation—where abstraction and representation drift into one another and forms appear to come into being before the viewer’s eyes.
Hazan often describes her images as unfolding “quickly and vividly, like skywriting.” Across the canvases, organic forms of trees and clouds hover, merge, and dissolve, their contours unfixed and mutable. The paintings resist stable interpretation, unfolding instead with the logic of waking dreams or remembered landscapes—open, shifting, and alive, embracing a degree of ambiguity. Working from ink and watercolor drawings approached as a stream-of-consciousness exercise, Hazan translates the fluidity of these works into oil paint, allowing each iteration to retain a sense of immediacy and openness. Atmosphere, rather than perspective or narrative, becomes the organizing principle.
Hazan’s approach is informed by François Cheng’s Empty and Full, which describes emptiness in Chinese painting not as absence, but as a generative force, one in which vapor becomes mountain, mountain becomes waterfall, and then vanishes again. In Double Fantasy, long contours hover along the edges of the picture plane, at times reading as trees, at times as human forms, and at others dissolving into clouds. Air circulates through the compositions as a sensual, animating substance. As critic Raphael Rubinstein observes, “what is paint, after all, but suspended particles of color into which we gaze?” In Hazan’s paintings, air is made visible—charged, palpable, and dreamlike—suggesting a world in which climate and interior experience begin to converge.
The exhibition takes its title from Double Fantasy, the 1980 album by John Lennon and Yoko Ono. For Hazan, the phrase speaks both to the mirage-like quality of her painted language and to the recurring motif of trees appearing in pairs or grouping, forms that “recombine almost like dancers on a stage.” Branches reach, touch, and lean toward one another, suggesting intimacy, coupling, and mutual support. The idea of fantasy underscores the impermanence and fluidity of these images, allowing meaning to remain deliberately unresolved.
Rooted in Hazan’s deep engagement with landscape and abstraction, Double Fantasy presents paintings that feel both conjured and embodied—visions of nature filtered through memory, atmosphere, and sensation, and offered as spaces of reflection, quiet wonder, and possibility. As climate and weather increasingly register as unstable and uncanny, Hazan’s landscapes take on a dreamlike intensity—suggesting a world in which exterior conditions feel ever closer to psychological terrain.
