There are the brushstrokes of paint that Heidi Hahn paints, that seems like perhaps a lifetime to acheive. To get to these minimal and fading characters. The colors are rich and the shapes are confident, the sort of dissolving into a background and yet permanent in the abstraction. “I take a brush and try to find a form, these shapes, a pose that’s going to do something to the shape of the canvas and within the canvas," Hahn says, and you can see her body work the paint across the canvas as she says this. Though they seem utterly quiet and in a moment of repose, Hahn's characters seems to move with you. They have action and power, and Marion Eisele writes in the press release for Kink Odelisk, Hahn's new solo show, "The various postures speak of resistance, if they have not already disappeared into abstraction. The depicted women bend their legs, fold their arms or lower their faces."
The fade is something that caught my eye in this new show at Kadel Willborn. The past few times I have looked at Hahn's work, there was more of a direct confrontation with the figures, and now they seem to be aged with time. But their poses are timeless, their power lies in something more concrete about our relation to time and authority. A beautiful display. —Evan Pricco
