Lexia Hachtmann offers a suite of new work in Waiting Room, her upcoming exhibition with YveYANG Gallery this spring. Painted with a deft hand, these surrealistic pieces seek to collapse the fourth dimension, while still pulsating with dramatic signifiers that tap into the surreal underbelly of our current moment.

The show's title was inspired by the eponymous liminal space in David Lynch's Twin Peaks, and she shares the recently deceased master's nonlinear approach to storytelling.

Hachtmann's cinematic terrain feels similar in its distorted faces and unsettling botany, but she veers from Lynch in her quest for a universal and authentic emotional intimacy. The viewer is left with the sensation that they have walked into a barroom after a fight has occurred. The reflections in her champagne glasses appear hauntingly familiar yet tinged with unease.

"I came to these canvases as an ambassador of zeitlos, that which is outside time," Hachtmann said. "Recently, I travelled through a country where the local myths and rituals were strange to me, nothing more than ancient cultures layered on top of each other. I wanted to take the viewer to that similar place of wandering through a landscape where symbols have broken down into archetypes. A fundamental, human place."

This feeling of unbelonging is best demonstrated in Out of Joint (2025), a scene at a party that might be taking place at the end of the world. The curious focal point is a lone man at the center of it, who looks off in the distance at a tree. Other people talk and kiss, but Hachtmann's sepia palette draws us toward this singular figure, deepening the melancholy already conjured by the title — a reference to a line spoken by Prince Hamlet and made famous by Jacques Derrida for its relationship to his concept of Hauntology.

A motif of yellow flowers recurs, their presence rooted in literature—particularly Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, in which Virginia Woolf appears as a character. In one scene, a ghostly figure contemplates a bloom—intricately rendered, delicate yet spiky. In another, a woman reaches for a jaundiced bouquet, set on a table inscribed with an otherworldly face—hopefully not her own. The image echoes Clarissa Dalloway’s sentiment, shortly after deciding to buy the flowers herself: 'She felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged.'

Elsewhere, Hachtmann presents a symphony of flowers in many varieties. She references Twin Peaks through the enigmatic character of the Arm—both evil and wise—who speaks in riddles through the dreams of Dale Cooper. Hachtmann’s flora are no less mysterious. Set against a rich, textured background, they hover between bud and senescence, suspended in a moment of transformation. Change is afoot—and all we know for certain is that Bella Donna (2025) is deadly.