Heidi Hahn

In Hahn’s studio, four half-completed oil paintings, leaning on the walls or propped on paint cans, surround us as we discuss her work. They depict individual women with flattened, oversize bodies, their torsos and limbs charting expanses of color and texture. “They’re fighting for their identities at this point,” “They’re fighting to be something special.” She’s determined the compositions but needs to work out her colors and glazing, which often build up to over a dozen slick layers that give her portraits a warm sheen. The process is intuitive—she never makes a preliminary drawing beforehand—yet deliberate. “I take a brush and try to find a form, these shapes, a pose that’s going to do something to the shape of the canvas and within the canvas,” Hahn says. “Then I try to impose the artificial nature of the paint—what can the paint do to deceive, or betray the form? It’s a lot of fighting what might look natural.”

The results are off-kilter in their heady palettes that combine, say, olive green and electric pink, or bold navy and soothing peachy hues. Hahn’s luminous lines freely mark out general contours of anatomy, gently exaggerating folds of skin and garment. In the dusky sunset world of Soft Joy #10 (2022), the bent knee of a woman rises like a wave, the line of her shin meeting the curve of her back. Soft Joy #5 (2022) is a muted picture of introspection—or perhaps defiance—its protagonist against a jam-red void with arms crossed to form a rigid block, and legs outstretched and on a lean, so she seems to teeter. “These women are kind of hiding themselves,” Hahn says. “It’s almost like they’re wearing armor, the way the paint resides on the surface. It’s almost like, ‘Get away, you’re not allowed! I’m in this space by myself. Don’t look at me.’”

Hahn’s mysterious women are amalgamations of people she knows—her sisters, mother, friends, and herself—although none are identifiable: recognition bores her. She’s been painting women her whole life, in part because she loves women’s stories, but fundamentally because these are her experiences. Born in Los Angeles, the child of a narcotics detective and a waitress, Hahn began painting when she was 15. The first painting she remembers making was a portrait of a woman with a bob and a corset. She leaned into art-making at the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts, then followed her dream of moving to New York and enrolled at Cooper Union, where, she recalls, she was a much more emotional painter, creating, in a professor’s words, “these serious, sad things.” After graduating, Hahn found herself in a rut, stuck in the studio and not receiving opportunities to show work. Then she pursued an MFA at Yale University, where she met other artists who inspired her to approach the canvas in new ways. She learned to not be so precious about her work; realizing that not every idea had to be spelled out, she felt a creative release. 

Hahn has since had solo exhibitions at galleries, including Jack Hanley Gallery and Nathalie Karg Gallery, both in New York, and Kohn Gallery in Los Angeles. Another large shift in her work came in 2021, while she was preparing for her first solo exhibition with the Kadel Willborn gallery in Düsseldorf. She was thinking about the lineage of painting in Germany, and art that astutely implied their meanings rather than easily delivering messages. “I felt a freedom I didn’t know I was even seeking permission to have,” she says. “I felt, ‘Oh, I can be a bit more twisted, a bit more insular.’ I just opened up.”

<Read the full essay from Issue Six>