“The only relationship I have with the work is here, while I’m making it. That’s when I’m learning from it,” says artist Heidi Hahn, to whom markmaking is an individual, intimate form of protest.

Opposing sexualized traditions of female portraiture privileging youth and beauty, the figures in Heidi Hahn’s paintings instead emphasize form and states of mind. These themes have permeated the artist’s work since her 2019 debut at this gallery. Her palette has become more refined, however, and her protagonists have gradually evolved from cartoonish to abstract—in fact, many portrayals here are so pared down as to seem practically nonobjective.

American artist Heidi Hahn really wants the visitors to “Not Your Woman,” her new show at Michael Kohn Gallery in Los Angeles, to think about the paint, even be seduced by it. “I still remember the first painting I did. I thought, This is it, this is the love of my life. I will never get over this,” she says. Hahn was 15, and had saved up the money to buy the paint from her weekend job working at a Los Angeles retirement home. Her picture was of an imagined woman.

Kohn Gallery opened Soft Joy, Heidi Hahn’s second solo presentation with the gallery. Known for her lushly evocative compositions of melancholic figures, Hahn wholly prioritizes the female experience.

Through deft use of texture, the Brooklyn painter renders her own experiences—privacy, vulnerability, and liberation among them—in meditative portraits of women asserting bodily autonomy and existing on their own terms.