Seven Sisters is pleased to present Wild Orchard, with Elizabeth Hazan and Sean Cairns, organized in collaboration with 12.26, Dallas. Bringing together distinct approaches to painting on paper, this two-person exhibition explores the pull between abstraction and observation, tradition and invention, memory and reinvention.
Both Hazan and Cairns are best known for their painting practices, and the smaller-scale works in Wild Orchard offer intimate views into the ways each artist develops images, tests compositions, and builds visual language.
Hazan’s ink and watercolor works on panel extend the exploratory process behind her oil paintings, allowing color and form to develop with a greater degree of immediacy and chance. “There’s a way that the watercolor is alive as it pools and the color really sings,” Hazan says. “The scale is all off, which is another thing I like. In a sense, they feel like big paintings in a small format.”
Cairns’ work draws on the visual language of the Midwestern landscape, where rolling hills, farmland, and open prairie become sites for both recollection and formal experimentation. Influenced by Color Field painting and German Expressionism, he manipulates texture, surface, and density to complicate the distinction between the painted and the perceived.
Together, Hazan and Cairns approach landscape as an untethered, almost spiritual space: at once cultivated and unruly, where remembered and imagined forms are freely reconstructed.
Elizabeth Hazan (b. 1965, New York, New York) was born and raised in New York City and attended Bryn Mawr College and the New York Studio School. She was awarded a fellowship to the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, has twice been a resident at Yaddo, and received a grant from the Peter S. Reed Foundation. Recent solo exhibitions include Double Fantasy and Under the Sun at HESSE FLATOW, New York; Weather at Pamela Salisbury Gallery, Hudson, New York; Sundown at Madoo Conservancy, Sagaponack, New York; High Noon at Duck Creek Art Center, Springs, New York; Body to Land at Turn Gallery, New York; and Heat Wave at Johannes Vogt Gallery, New York, and the recent group exhibitions The Quiet Hour at Olney/Gleason, New York; Painting Energy at the Portland Museum of Art, Maine. Her work has been written about in Hyperallergic, Forbes, Two Coats of Paint, Art Critical, The Brooklyn Rail, and The Art Newspaper. From 2018–2026, she served as founder and director of Platform Project Space in Brooklyn. Hazan is represented by HESSE FLATOW, New York.
Sean Cairns (b. 1988, Sparta, Illinois) lives and works in Dallas, Texas. He received his MFA from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 2014 and his BFA from the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design in 2011. Cairns has presented solo exhibitions with Shrine, New York (2025); 12.26, Dallas (2024); and Valley House Gallery, Dallas (2023, 2021), among others. His work is held in the permanent collection of the Dallas Museum of Art. Cairns is represented by 12.26, Dallas.