EJ Hauser, Cherry Haze, 2023-24, 20x16" acrylic on canvas
EJ Hauser | Arthur L. and Sheila Prensky Island Press Visiting Artist Lecture
EJ Hauser will deliver the 2025 Arthur L. and Sheila Prensky Island Press Visiting Artist Lecture as part of the Sam Fox School’s Public Lecture Series at WashU.
As the Spring 2025 Arthur L. and Sheila Prensky Island Press Visiting Artist, EJ Hauser will complete a week-long residency working alongside students in Island Press, a research-based printmaking workshop at WashU that is committed to creating and publishing innovative prints and multiples, educating students and the broader community about print media, and advancing the printmaking field.
About EJ Hauser
EJ Hauser (they/them) lives and works in both Brooklyn and Upstate NY, and is represented by Derek Eller Gallery in New York City and Haverkampf & Leistenschneider in Berlin.
Hauser’s paintings are both graphic and open to interpretation, teetering between iconography and something familiar but abstract. This imagery shifts between omnivorous references both ancient and current — the paintings are mysterious talismans, employing buzzing pallets and marks that dance. Stuttering lines form a visual code like musical notes, which coalesce with atmospheric layers to create ineffable messages.
Hauser’s source library draws from the natural world, imagery that is cross-pollinated with the formal qualities found in craftwork like rugs, fabrics, wallpapers, and mosaics, as well as digital visual characteristics, which they interpret through drawing and then transliterate onto canvas. Each piece is composed of multiple layers of color.
They have shown extensively throughout the United States and Europe, including Anton Kern Gallery, New York, NY; Haverkampf Leistenschneider, Berlin, DE; Brigitte Mulholland Paris, FR; Parrasch Heijnen, Los Angeles, CA; Sperone Westwater, New York, NY; White Columns, New York, NY; Participant Inc., New York, NY; Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York, NY; Cheim & Read, New York, NY; The Journal Gallery, New York, NY; AWHRHWAR, Los Angeles, CA; KARST, Brighton, UK; The Breeder, Athens, GR.
Hauser’s work has been featured in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Frieze, The Brooklyn Rail, BOMB Magazine, and Turps Banana, among others. Hauser received a BFA from University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA and an MFA from University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC. They are a recipient of the 2021 American Academy of Arts and Letters Purchase Prize. In the Fall of 2023, Hauser was the Teiger Mentor in the Arts at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY.
EJ Hauser, Tangerine Dream, 2023-24, 20x16", acrylic on canvas
EJ Hauser, Cosmic Collison, 2023-24, 63x60", acrylic on canvas
More Upcoming Lectures
Nov 19 at 5:30pm • Steinberg Auditorium
Artist Panel: Mary Weatherford and Katharina Grosse
Artists Katharina Grosse and Mary Weatherford, whose works are featured in Making Their Mark: Works from the Shah Garg Collection, both engage forms of nonfigurative painting that have a strong sensorial presence. A discussion moderated by Sabine Eckmann, William T. Kemper Director and Chief Curator, will explore how their polyphonic structures invite careful seeing to suggest alternative worlds.
Part of the Sam Fox School Public Lecture Series
About the Artists
Katharina Grosse was born in Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany in 1961. She has held professorships at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (2010–18) and Weißensee Kunsthochschule Berlin (2000–9) and currently lives and works in Berlin and New Zealand. Her recent institutional exhibitions and on-site paintings include The Sprayed Dear at the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart (until January 2026), Wunderbild at the Deichtorhallen Hamburg (until September 2025), Déplacer les étoiles, Centre Pompidou – Metz (2024–25); Why Three Tones Do Not Form a Triangle; Albertina, Vienna (2023–24); and Studio Paintings, 1988–2022: Returns, Revisions, Inventions, Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis (2022), toured to Kunstmuseum Bern (2023) and Kunstmuseum Bonn (2024). In June 2025, she realized a temporary in-situ work for Art Basel on the fair’s forecourt and the adjacent architectural structures. Museum collections include Albertina, Vienna; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; ARKEN Museum for Moderne Kunst, Copenhagen; Baltimore Museum of Art; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Istanbul Modern; Kunstmuseum Bonn; Louis Vuitton Foundation, Paris; Magasin III, Stockholm; MARe (Muzeul de Artă Recentă / Museum of Recent Art), Bucharest; MAXXI – Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, Rome; Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee; Museum Azman, Jakarta; Museum of Fine Arts Bern; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Serralves Museum, Porto; Staatliche Museen zu Berlin; and QAGOMA, Brisbane.
Photo Credit: Franz Grünewald
Mary Weatherford was born in Ojai, California. She earned a BA from Princeton University in 1984, was a Helena Rubinstein Fellow of the Whitney Independent Study Program in 1985, and graduated with an MFA from the Milton Avery School of Fine Arts at Bard College in 2006. Weatherford makes paintings that evoke a specific time, locale, and temperature. Her recent works, in which the canvases are affixed and sometimes juxtaposed with working neon light, provide an elusive and sometimes radical comment on the legacy of gestural abstraction. Weatherford is noted for her masterful use of overlapping fields of color, and as her work has advanced the increasingly complex and luminous interactions between paint, lighting, and wiring have produced a hybrid form that collapses the distinction between painting and installation. She currently lives and works in Los Angeles.
Photo Credit: Antony Hoffman