CRITIC’S PICKS
By Annabel Osberg
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.
The paintings in the main gallery tower over the viewer, making the subjects within feel like renderings of monumental sites. The personage of NOT YOUR WOMAN #8 (all works 2025) becomes a waterfall—her small, angular head is attached to a free-flowing giant body dissolving into vertical forms. Below the head is a cleft that could represent a wound, or even a spine. The painting is in dialogue with the work of myriad other artists: The palette and woman’s pose recall Matisse’s dancers, while her blocky geometry echoes Christina Ramberg’s renditions of female torsos. And the lines at the bottom of the composition seem to quote the shapes in modernist abstractions by Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, et al.
Hahn’s women appear to fold and expand like origami, Cubist sculptures, or architectural structures—they are not just bodies, but loci of thoughts and feelings. At their best, her subjects become open-ended conundrums: Is the glowing scarlet triangle in NOT YOUR WOMAN #9 a human head, or a red-roofed house on a cliff? Could the overall form be a car’s rear-view mirror, or a bust seen from behind?
Displayed in the smaller gallery is a grouping of comparatively tiny canvases, not much larger than postcards, similarly replete with narrative potential. Here, the materiality of the paint plays a bigger role, and the figures seem small in comparison to their environments—not completely at the mercy of their surroundings, though certainly affected by them.
The dominant mood of Hahn’s paintings is consistently one of pensive self-containment, yet their ambiguity leaves room for viewers to project their own thoughts. Such freedom is refreshing at a time when women’s bodies, especially in the United States, are being seen as things that need to be controlled, scrutinized, and endlessly put upon.