Description

Heidi Hahn. The Body is Not Essential. 22" x 26", Archival pigment print. Signed edition of 35. $200. Simultaneously exploring the figurative and the abstract, Heidi Hahn's paintings employ washes of vibrant color that enhance the ambiguous narratives and dense psychological intensity within. With compositions often centering around female figures, Hahn's characters refuse prying interpretation, blanketing their outward gaze or reclining their bodies into purposefully enigmatic poses. The Body is Not Essential is from a series of thirteen paintings of the same name. The series uses the recurring image of a woman nestled under a tree in an ambiguous mode of respite to explore the subject of female sexuality. In the iteration available now on Exhibition A, Hahn's subject lays contemplatively against an apple tree -- the curve of her body a direct contrast to the verticality of the trunk, activating phallic symbolism -- in a private moment of pleasure that reverberates with eroticism.