Double Fantasy, Elizabeth Hazan’s second solo show with HESSE FLATOW, takes its title both from Hazan’s doubling (an improvisational tendency: these paintings start from spontaneous ink and watercolor sketches, giving them a certain looping rhythm) and from the final John Lennon/Yoko Ono album of the same name, released in 1980. If that album conveyed intimacy and reconciliation through collaboration and reflection, here Hazan’s thirteen vivid abstracts use the hazy, refracting nature of memory and dreams to convey the sacred, interconnected, and confounding nature of life itself.
The sunset kiss-scene Mating (2025) locks two warbly tree-topped bodies in an embrace not unlike that of the Lennon/Ono album cover. The lines defining their masses at first seem solid, only to expand and dissipate in various hues, as if they’re surrounded by a thick dense atmosphere that refracts from pink to near-yellow as the sun descends. There’s an undeniable stunned-before-lava-lamp effect to Hazan’s choice of radioactive scarlet, a relentless hue that’s echoed both in the smaller Field #197 (2026) and the complex root-and-tunnel system of Coffee and Oranges (2025). The latter, one of the boldest paintings of this set, combines Hazan’s tendency for verticality (trees grow; shadowy crevasses descend) and her spiritual affinity for ecology: everything, from the moon-grey rivers to the scarlet ground, seems to originate from and flow out of something else.
