The Hole is proud to announce Winter Flowers, a special two-person exhibition by Caroline Larsen and Vanessa Prager. Featuring new oil paintings by both artists of harmonious and bountiful bouquets with plenty of thick paint, in this show, more is more.

Winter flowers are needed, why wait for spring? The gallery is our metaphorical greenhouse, warming the space for their blooms to open in these colder months—or perhaps bringing the heat needed for these uber-thick paintings to dry! Using bags of oil pigment with icing nibs, Caroline Larsen squirts and squeezes the paint into confectionary piles, frosting the panel with tubular and Spiro-form extrusions. In these works, Larsen goes mad for plaid adding psychedelic patterns to the background. Vanessa Prager, too, is known for working with a preponderance of paint, her elaborate impasto technique builds up layers of oil on canvas to create sculptural surfaces. These bouquets are an extension of her portraits series suggested by hints of shoulders.

While both artists fill their canvases with life, flowers at their zenith in full bloom and glory, in reality, these flowers are doomed, shares Larsen, lives cut short and arranged in water for our joy. “I feel that painting still life flowers and cut flowers, in general, are very vain - as you kill something with beauty to slowly watch it die for your pleasure. The painting of the cut flowers is like you’re trying to capture the essence of one nature’s more magical creations before it wilts away and becomes decrepit.” Both Larsen and Prager address life—human and floral—in their works, capturing the living at its best and brightest. Prager provides a powerful ambiguity in obscuring her vessels.

In Masquerade there is an almost human-like silhouette to the arrangement, is this a body or bouquet? Prager’s work often shifts between still life and classicism with prior series dedicated to ambiguously stunning half-floral beings, faceless subjects replaced with bouquets. In Larsen’s new series, we also see figures for the first time in her floral scenarios, in Plaid with Lady with Fan Vase a 1920’s style figure rendered in blue peers coyly over her shoulder and I Rather Drown Than Ask for Help the vase is comprised of a drowning woman in the style of Roy Lichtenstein.

A painting of a flower is susceptible to a quick take yet both artists provide us with the need to linger and look. Since a floral arrangement in a vase was allowed to be the sole protagonist of a painting at the turn of the 17th century in the Dutch Golden Age, this genre has endured many iterations across the movements and centuries. Here in 2023, Larsen uses Longwy Art Deco vases, pop culture references, and reinterpreted Rococo Revival-era vases to present impossibly bright and thick flower arrangements against optically scintillating backgrounds. As if, Larsen’s Clueless painting was inspired by Iggy Azalea’s music video for “Fancy”, where Azalea is dressed as Cher from Clueless. Meanwhile, in texture and depth Prager offers us veiled dynamic interpretations, invoking motifs of Cezanne’s post-impressionist flower paintings with a new swirling opulence and renewal.

Caroline Larsen (b. 1980, Toronto) is a Canadian painter and sculptor who has been living and working in Brooklyn since her graduation from the Pratt MFA program in 2015. This is her fourth exhibition at The Hole after Kabloom! (2016), Kaleidoscopic (2019), and Double Vision (2021) with Roxanne Jackson. She has also presented solo exhibitions with Mindy Solomon in Miami, Andrew Rafacz in Chicago, Dio Horia in Greece, and Craig Krull in LA. Notable group exhibitions include the Crystal Bridges Museum in Arkansas, the Spring Break Art Fair, the Hollis Taggart Gallery, and curatorial projects by Jill Gerstenblatt, Maria Brito, Emily Burns, and Swizz Beats. Her her work has been reviewed in The Brooklyn Rail, Office Magazine, TimeOut Israel, Artnews, Artinfo, Vice Magazine, Juxtapoz Magazine, and Hyperallergic.

Vanessa Prager (USA, b. 1984 Los Angeles) is a self-taught artist based in Los Angeles. She has had two prior solo shows at The Hole, New York, In The Pink (2018) and Voyeur (2016). She has also presented solo exhibitions with Diane Rosenstein, Los Angeles (2023 & 2021), at Kristin Hjellegjerde, Berlin (2019), and London (2018); plus Richard Heller, Los Angeles (2017). Recent group shows include The Flower Show L.A. Louver, Venice, CA (2023), Storage Wars The Hole, Los Angeles, CA (2023), The Street and The Shop, Curated by Michael Slenske, Venice, CA (2022) and Go Figure!, Curated by Beth Rudin DeWoody, Eric Firestone Gallery, East Hampton, NY (2019). Recent reviews and press include Forbes, Flaunt, and Artillery Magazine.