Downtown, Los Angeles
Flora Hauser
Telescope at the Sun
IbidIbid Gallery is pleased to present the debut US solo exhibition of Vienna-based artist Flora Hauser. Building upon her first institutional exhibition titled Heimoti at Kunstraum Innsbruck, Austria, Hauser continues her consideration into how definitions of home, habitat, and identity are formed in relation to natural and personal landscapes. Flora Hauser’s practice spans the space between writing and drawing. Her paintings and drawings suggest visual landscapes without necessarily depicting an illusionistic space. Subdued color washes spreads across her large-scale canvas with the quality of a Romantic watercolorist, but neater – upon closer examination of the surface, the washes are revealed as drawn in color pencil rather than painted. Finely sharpened pencil point is the tongue of Hauser’s coded drawing vocabulary. Her glyph-based drawn forms accompany the color washes to form topographic images. Elevations are read according to color-coding and symbol, though without a key. In this way, Hauser’s canvases hold two forms images: the illusionistic image space and the topographic vantage point. The third perspective or image-form present in Hauser’s work is the textual qualities of the canvases. In the tradition of artists and authors like Unica Zürn and Robert Walser, both of whom kept notebooks and diaries of micro-drawing and writing, Hauser’s journals and memo pads are filled with unusual lists, personal reflections, diagrams, and observations. Hauser’s canvases and works on paper are part of the same system of writing and drawing running through her notebooks and daily life. Traces of a common spirit are felt across her practices, a phantasmagoria of landscape and interiority. These new works on canvas and paper are directly influenced by the diversity of California’s natural landscapes, which Hauser traveled through extensively earlier this year during her residency at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture. Her travels through Sequoia National Park, Joshua Tree, and Angeles National Forest informed the pictures as an outsider new to the landscape – not emotionally or sentimentally attached, but overwhelmed nonetheless. While Hauser’s Kunstraum Innsbruck exhibition considered the 11th century German word Heimoti as related to the contemporary German term for “homeland”, but with an emphasis on local habitat rather than national identity, Telescope at the Sun takes its focus as an outsider to an unfamiliar landscape. Flora Hauser was born 1992 in Vienna, Austria. She studied at die Graphische, Vienna; the University of Applied Arts, Vienna; and the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Arts Paris-Cergy, Paris. Her first debut solo exhibition Owls and Foes at Ibid Gallery, London, UK (2015) was followed shortly by her debut solo museum exhibition Heimoti at Kunstraum Innsbruck, Austria (2016). Recent group exhibitions include EEA 13 at the Rietveld Pavilion, Amsterdam (2013); If Damien were Viennese at ve.sch, Vienna (2014); … und eine welt noch (… and yet one more world) at Kunsthaus Hamburg, Germany (2016); focus (2-7) at Ibid Gallery, London, UK (2016); sec. at Galerie Christine König, Vienna (2016); and Les Limbes at La Galerie – Centre d’Art Contemporain, Paris Noisy, France. She was a 2018 MAK Center Artist-in-Residence at the Rudolph Schindler designed Mackey Apartments in Los Angeles, CA. Flora Hauser currently lives and works in Vienna, Austria.