Hollywood, Los Angeles
Heidi Hahn
Not Your Woman
Michael Kohn GalleryMichael Kohn Gallery is pleased to present Not Your Woman, the third solo exhibition by Brooklyn-based artist Heidi Hahn. Comprised of eight large-scale paintings and fifteen smaller works, the exhibition unfolds in two distinct yet interconnected experiences—one driven by scale, the other by genre as a point of rupture. Hahn’s paintings hover between image and material, allowing the physicality of paint to dictate form, meaning, and perception. Rather than adhering to figuration, her work uses abstraction to reshape narrative, destabilizing conventional readings of the body. Paint itself becomes an active force, shifting the boundaries of representation and revealing a more elusive reality. Following the trajectory of her previous series—Soft Joy, Thoughts That Break the Soul, and Flex, Rot, and Spi(l)t—this new body of work introduces a renewed dialogue between scale and expression. The larger paintings remain open-ended and experimental, posing questions about presence, perception, and form. The smaller works, by cowillntrast, engage with genre—landscape, the pastoral—subverting tradition to offer an alternative narrative. If the larger paintings pose the question, the smaller works attempt, or complicate, a response. Hahn’s compositions—characterized by exaggerated forms, expansive color fields, and gestural layers—foreground the tension between surface and depth, material and meaning. Figures are fractured, displaced, and abstracted, not to erase them but to strip away expectations. “I think the paintings are protective of the body,” Hahn notes, “I always angle [subjects] to distort or turn out the meaning of a feminine body. These paintings are not interested in figuration, or representation, but in dealing with the nature of abstraction as a means to find a different narration.” This approach allows her work to exist in a space where meaning remains fluid, shifting between what is seen, what is felt, and what resists being fully known. Heidi Hahn creates introspective paintings that engage with the female body. Her sumptuously atmospheric and layered application of paint, in conversation with aesthetic traditions, draw the viewer into a psychological space that evokes our attachment to the female form and how that is processed through both a traditional and a contemporary reading. Gestural, fluid, and frequently spectral, Hahn’s works reframe and re-contextualize her subjects, exploring the ambiguous and shifting boundaries between public and private selves. Hahn received her M.F.A. from Yale University in 2014, and was a Professor of Painting and Drawing at Alfred University, NY. She has been the recipient of several awards, residencies, and fellowships, including the Jerome Foundation Grant, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture Residency, Madison, ME; and the Fine Arts Work Center Residency, Provincetown, MA, among others. Her work has been collected by Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, NL; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, LA; and the Kadist Foundation, Paris, France. Her work has also been reviewed in numerous publications, including The New York Times and Art in America.