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."
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."
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 .
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