INNER WORLDS Heidi Hahn’s work splits the difference between the imagistic and evocative qualities of painting, between its ability to construct narrative and its desire to evade language. Hahn’s images relay loosely rendered female figures set against indistinct backgrounds that can suggest a real location—a city street, a shop, a bedroom—or give only a hint of site within what is an otherwise largely abstract surface. This ambiguous treatment of ground evidences the artist’s refusal of specificity, her purposeful confusion of temporalities and bodies, and of interior and exterior as place and metaphor. The women pictured are abstracted, elongated, and somewhat lumpy, and their insinuated faces are hard to read beneath their heavy hair. They suggest not so much particular people as symbolic figures who have conjured their own surroundings. These in turn seem to be mental states as much as places; these settings can be all at once lonely, crowded, intimate, public, fleeting, and monumental. Hahn’s figures reference women in her life, including her friends, mother, and sister, but they become archetypal and often cartoonish in her hands, their import derived largely from the affective resonance of the painting. The artist deploys a range of visuality to give life to her recurrent women—canvases can be minimal, almost color field paintings; lavish and awash with patterning and details; or impressionistic, tangled with sinewy brushwork. While we cannot know these women, we might sense the inner world they inhabit. Hahn constructs her paintings beginning with a figurative image painted directly onto the canvas; she does not create preparatory drawings, preferring instead to sketch with paint. She often paints the same image on multiple canvases—up to ten at a time—and then works across the canvases simultaneously. Some paintings maintain the structure suggested by the artist’s initial outline, but most morph into radically different compositions, becoming singular elements in a larger body of related works. This mode of working reflects two critical aspects of the artist’s practice: her understanding of representation and abstraction, and her abiding belief in the process of painting. Hahn has described abstraction as a mode of “falling apart”—something that was once clear and articulable dissolving. While she begins with a specific representation, each work is determined by an improvisational process and the materiality of paint, which in the artist’s hands runs the gamut from silky dark outlines and inky washes of color to thick impasto topographies and looping brushstrokes. They are works that find their own logics and languages in the possibility of paint. Hahn offers a painterly version of illustrative tendencies that call to mind the work of such artists such as Joan Brown, Phillip Guston, Ezra Jack Keats, and Henri Matisse. The resulting paintings bear traces of previous gestures, evidenced in interlaced lines visible below thin fields of pigment and in layers of overpainting. The artist’s recent works increasingly emphasize her complex relationship to drawing, outlining forms and filling them in or going over them with sweeps of color that can reinforce or contradict the image she is creating.
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Burn Out in Shredded Heaven 11 (2018–19) shows a woman in profile; she is perched on the edge of a bed, one leg bent and drawn to her chest as her flared pants hang down over her boots. Her far hand holds her head, her palm pressed to her cheek as she stares at her own reflection, rendered in thin purple brushstrokes. The setting is ambiguous, composed of a filmy vertical wash of marigold yellow and pastel peach, and punctuated only with a dark maroon-brown rectangle of furniture and delicate outlines of architecture and objects. The artist’s depiction suggests that this is a bedroom— the barely open door in the background, the nearby table lamp, the way the bedspread hangs down, and the mood she conjures implies that this is undoubtedly a private space. The warm intimacy of the room and the still, contemplative action of the figure suggest an atmospheric solitude that engulfs the small domestic space, a dreamlike, lonely site. Burn Out in Shredded Heaven 1 and Burn Out in Shredded Heaven 2 (both 2018–19) feature the same blond woman, perhaps pictured over the course of her day-to-day. Both paintings depict the figure’s seemingly interior state but this time transposed into public settings. Seen in a department store, she has a hesitation as she approaches a glass case of purses overseen by a vacant faced young woman. In the other painting she is observed looking over the shoulder of a woman absorbed in her cell phone.. In both works this blonde woman’s presence seems at once invisible and intrusive. A woman sitting on a crowded subway car in Burn Out in Shredded Heaven 4 (2018–19) holds her handbag in her lap as her loosely rendered eyes and mouth—dashes of dark color—share the same downturned sadness. In this suite of paintings Hahn has highlighted figures over a previous interest in landscape or space, probing how we might remain apart even when we are together. All three of these paintings emphasize the back of those pictured or otherwise allude to a kind of turning away from the other figures in the painting or the viewer. Despite, or perhaps because of, the populated spaces the central women occupy, the gravity of each woman’s being seens all the more full. Burn Out in Shredded Heaven 9 (2018–19), the most atmospheric of the works in this series, features overlapping sketchy figures populating an indiscernible watercolor-like pink space. The figures appear as only loose lines, ghostly and incomplete, receding into the background. Here more than elsewhere Hahn’s sense of space, color, abstraction, and figuration reveal themselves to be intractably intertwined; affect and depiction propelling each other even in the space of illegibility. Hahn’s paintings are simple scenes and elusive, expansive images. Each woman inhabits a contemporary space that we can recognize, but as Hahn depicts them, each also exists in a world unto herself—each painting an embodiment of this world.1 — Diana Nawi
1 This is adapted from a text originally published in the fall of 2018 by the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, Kansas, in conjunction with the exhibition Pulse.
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PAINTINGS
BURN OUT IN SHREDDED HEAVEN 1 2018-19 OIL ON CANVAS 80 X 74 INCHES
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BURN OUT IN SHREDDED HEAVEN 2 2018-19 OIL ON CANVAS 60 X 54 INCHES
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