The Expressive—and Intently Feminine—Abstractions of Heidi Hahn
By Simon Chilvers
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.
Hahn has put the act of painting women at the center of her practice ever since. “The paintings are an amalgamation of my mother, my sisters, the women I know, who I am as a woman,” she says. Crucial to Hahn’s point of view is that her work is produced from a female perspective. “I think these paintings try to contend with the way women have usually been represented, which is through an erotic lens, even while masquerading as liberation and freedom.”
“Not Your Woman,” which opens on April 25 and runs through June 6, includes both large-scale and smaller works. The title of the show is a swipe at the current political landscape. “Well, I think we were promised that the future was female and we know that’s not the truth, especially in America,” she sighs. “I always had this conversation with friends that to be an artist is a form of protest. And I wonder, is that true? I’ve thought about my own work, and I think I am protesting ideas about certain things, of how I feel as a woman.”
Born in 1982, Hahn received her bachelor’s degree in fine art from Cooper Union in 2006 and her master’s from Yale in 2014. (She currently teaches a graduate course at the New York Academy of Art.) In conversation she flits between allusions to complex female figures, such as Patricia Highsmith (“This woman is horrible and it’s fascinating”) or Maria Lassnig (“her biography is really good, even though she’s kind of horrible”), confessing her soft spot for people who hate everything. She values criticism, encourages her students to get angry; at a recent art opening, she heard a supposedly feminist man use the word “bimbo” on a panel, and is still fuming over it. “Are we really calling women bimbos again? Wow.”
The women in Hahn’s early figurative works, from around 2016–2017—some based on her mother and her mother’s friends—drew comparisons with Edvard Munch, Lisa Yuskavage, and Dana Schutz. Her women would evolve into increasingly striking and emboldened forms, pushing out to the edges of the canvas and filling the space with a controlled sense of poise and contemplative presence, which might evoke power or melancholy depending on your point of view. By 2022, these figures resolved to be even surer; a series of fantastic curves and lines rendered in a tastefully restrained, slightly off palette, enveloped in interesting clothing or oversized silhouettes. Imagine Milton Avery’s late portraits through the eyes of a minimalist.
“I wanted them to be clothed, but I didn’t want it to be about fashion,” she says. “I didn’t want it to be something that was recognizable. It was more about the idea of clothes and clothes as a platform for the paint to do something other than what it would do to skin, the background, hair.”
When she was growing up in LA, Hahn’s father worked as a narcotics detective while her mother, who sometimes waitressed or worked desk jobs, mostly spent her time protecting her three daughters from the violent intensity of her husband’s work. Hahn remembers her mother subscribing to fashion magazines, and today keenly follows fashion herself. She enjoys fashion documentaries—“I really like how designers break down their influences”—and often takes color inspiration from the runways; she’s particularly enthusiastic about Haider Ackerman’s recent debut for Tom Ford, for example.
Yet Hahn ultimately found art through literature. “Literature was where all art resided. We didn’t grow up going to museums or talking about visual art,” she says. “I read Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady when I was probably too young. But seeing the artistry in literature and how people compose these worlds, there was an inkling of something outside the world I was living in,” she offers. “I think that’s all you need to become an artist.”
One of Hahn’s favorite novels is The Day of the Locust by Nathaniel West, which she says perfectly captures the underbelly of LA, though lately she’s been immersed in books by women engaging in interior dialogues about their place in the world, such as Vivian Gornick’s The Odd Woman and the City or Olivia Lange’s Everybody: A Book About Freedom.
Her newest work has grown quietly in its ambition, moving increasingly toward abstraction as the figurative aspects become less explicit. “When I was younger, it was kind of like, Look what I can do, look how pretty this can be, how acceptable. Here’s someone holding a purse.” She smiles. “The women in the paintings are getting more and more interior. I’m not trying to explain everything. I can set the stage, put the music on, light the candles, but I think people have their own ability to dissect what they want from art.”
Despite describing this as the hardest body of work she has ever made—in part because she originally started it for a show at Mitchell-Innes & Nash’s Chelsea gallery, which then closed—the paintings Hahn shows me from her studio in East Williamsburg are confident, strong, and fascinating. There are undercurrents of Mark Rothko, Christina Ramberg, and Philip Guston.
A lot of the women in these paintings are in the process of becoming rather than complete, Hahn explains. One is imprisoned. One is built up on pink legs, has a tank-like torso, a pushed-back head, and a pink box that Hahn refers to as a skirt being pulled over the central form. Another is set against a saturated, pure orange—Hahn’s favorite color—holding a protective stance. “A friend of mine said, ‘it looks like she’s in a straight-jacket.’ Oh, God, it’s not that, but it’s definitely something where they’re putting their hands up and saying, ‘I’m here. I’m sitting here and I’m within myself.’”
Hahn’s interest in the sensuality of paint is particularly evident. “The work is built up in a very careful way because it’s a lot of pouring of paint onto the canvas,” she explains. “You have to be a bit of a psychic. You have to be thinking, In five moves, the painting is going to need this.” Physically, there is a lot of movement in the process, which she likens to abstract expressionism, Helen Frankenthaler’s paintings, and the pour work of Lynda Benglis. “Someone said to me that these new paintings look like they’re painting themselves, unfolding and unravelling before your very eyes,” Hahn says.
How does she know when a painting is finished, then? “Usually when it stops asking me questions,” she replies with a laugh. “I learned a lot from this body of work. It was like I went through intensive therapy. But I’d rather fail and have questions that keep me painting than succeed and not be able to paint.”
The paintings have barely left her studio for LA, and she’s already priming new canvases in her studio. “I really want to get back to work,” she says, smiling.