Exhibitions

On the surface, Heidi Hahn makes paintings about the relationship between the formal elements of her work and the content within them. The slippage around these binaries reveal the necessity of each. Both working together to form a space outside of its object-hood, making room for another kind of experience of painting. As a way to separate her female subjects from tropes, genre, and gendered expectation, Hahn’s paintings offer a tactile disconnect from traditional representation. Which in turn, reorganizes the role of what content is in painting. How do we represent things differently from what they mean? How does the material govern the content? And what does the body have to do to escape itself?

Heidi Hahn writes:

“I think about the horizon line as a separation of expectation and reality. It is this illusive thing that offers destination, future, and stability of place. Yet once you set out and arrive there, it has disappeared and been replaced with another horizon. So it is a fact and an illusion. I wanted that false promise for the work, an offer but never a fulfillment, a fact inside a lie. If painting is fact because of its solid form then the content is the lie that keeps you staring, hoping, wondering. It changes depending on the mood, age, and understanding of our own lives. I don't want to go to the horizon but I want to see it. I want to know that it's there. Like with painting, I want to see it all laid out before me. I want to understand it inherently, but I also want it to have the ability to change in front of me.”