Aspen Art Fair 2026

HESSE FLATOW is pleased to participate in the 2026 Aspen Art Fair, with a group presentation of new and recent works by Bix Archer, Sarah Blaustein, Michael Childress, Cooper Cox, Elizabeth Hazan, James Morse, and Jonathan Ryan. We look forward to seeing you in Room 124!

Bix Archer (b.1997, lives in New York, NY) approaches painting as a way of rendering experience beyond vision, using 'en plein air' observation to transform familiar places into sites of discovery. Working across multiple moments in time, she layers memory, observation, and recollection into paintings that embrace instability and constant change. Her work proposes a mode of perception rooted in disruption, transformation, and a distinctly queer way of seeing.

Sarah Blaustein (b.1982, lives in San Francisco, CA) centers painting as a living, relational space that unfolds between the work and the viewer. Through intuitive, gestural mark-making with acrylic, ink, and water, she creates fluid, responsive surfaces that hold memory, emotion, and bodily sensation in constant dialogue. Her paintings invite close looking and offer a space for reflection, shared presence, and human connection.

Michael Childress (b.1987, lives in Florence, MA) presents modular canvases consisting of rectangular units that are spaced and stacked vertically in combinations of registers, exploring languages of minimalism and geometric abstraction as ways to embody and delineate space. Drawing on concepts from physics and perceptual experience, his work uses abstraction as a spatial model for considering the unseen forces that shape how we inhabit and understand the world.

Cooper Cox (b.1978, lives in Brooklyn, NY and Sun Valley, ID) presents paintings that explore the intersection of contemporary landscape and technological imaging. Using oil, he builds richly textured, optically charged paintings that merge natural scenes with augmented reality, drawing on both Romantic landscape traditions and his upbringing in the Intermountain West. His hybrid compositions blur the boundaries between the natural and synthetic, inviting prolonged looking and reimagining landscape as a space where technology, perception, and myth converge.

Elizabeth Hazan (b.1965, lives in New York, NY) presents aerial landscape paintings that mix gestural topography with elements of modernist abstraction. The work depicts a heightened version of nature off-kilter, evoking a charged atmosphere, familiar to the viewer yet verging on the surreal.

James Morse (b.1982, lives in Northport, MI) is a painter whose practice is rooted in direct engagement with the coastal landscape of Northport, Michigan, where walking, sailing, skating, canoeing, and swimming shape his experience of place. Working in oil, he translates these lived encounters into paintings that reflect the rhythms of the rural landscape and its surrounding villages.

Jonathan Ryan (b.1989, lives in Los Angeles, CA) debuts new work that transforms geologic forms, deserts, and celestial imagery into surreal landscapes that merge abstraction with representation. Using layered pigment and natural materials such as sand and decomposed granite, he creates textured compositions that blur the boundaries between the terrestrial and the cosmic, inviting contemplation of perception, time, and humanity’s relationship to the natural world.

OPENING PREVIEW DAY: