Ibid

Flora Hauser

06 May - 27 Jun 2015

Installation view, Flora Hauser, Owls and Foes, Ibid. London
FLORA HAUSER
Owls and Foes
6 May – 27 June 2015

Ibid. London is pleased to present a solo show with Austrian artist, Flora Hauser (b.1992) entitled Owls and Foes. Flora is currently completing her final year at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna and this will be her first solo exhibition.

Flora Hauser’s practice spans between writing and drawing, and in her work the two themes of repetition and surface often intertwine to create a language alluding to codes or topographies. She has said that for her, the feeling of drawing is the same as of writing and at times the two become interchangeable. Hauser works almost exclusively in pencil, including the background of the canvas in which watercolour pencil is used.

The show at Ibid will comprise of works on canvas, drawings and vitrines containing notebooks, sketches, and other personal objects. Each object contains scribbles, words, and patterns in pencil, inspired by handwriting, but more often resembling codes. From a distance the nude tones of her canvases appear subtle and calm, but on close inspection, the scrawled compositions reveal a more phantasmagoric landscape. It is through this method that the subversive narratives underscoring her paintings come to light. Her work shows honest and natural impressions, an ‘overall world’ and at the same time experiment with composition - deciding how deep or layered certain colours or pencils will work with each other and how reduced or untreated other parts of the canvas can be. The works are expressionistic in that they convey emotional experience over physical reality.

In the tradition of artists like Unica Zurn, whose fantastical and intricate drawings were also produced in notebooks, Hauser's inscribed journals, memo pads and loose-leaf pages will be displayed in vitrines along with her paintings. In contrast to her more fluid works on canvas, the anachronistic lists, personal reflections and doodles rendered on a miniature scale follow a more ordered yet eccentric pattern. Somewhere between typography and calligraphy, the drawings in her notebooks are not planned but designed as she goes along, working intuitively

Flora’s recent shows include Flora Hauser, Michael Van den Abeele and Flora Hauser, Ibid. London; Let’s Mingle, Perpetual Experts, Vienna; EEA 13, The Rietveld Pavilion, Amsterdam; Aufstellungen, realised by Hans Schabus Skulpturinstitut, Vienna; If Damien were Viennese, ve.sch,Vienna; and will have a solo presentation with Ibid. at the forthcoming Liste 20 in Basel.
 

Tags: Michael van den Abeele, Hans Schabus