Andrew Hahn | Paintings for Achillia
February 20 - March 21
Opening Reception, February 20, 7-10pm
WPA is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings and prints by Andrew Hahn. “Paintings for Achillia” features three oil paintings that continue Hahn’s investigation of the female portrait, but here his ghostly cinematic and disembodied faces achieve a grand scale, and the figurative fragmentation of bound feet shows up in two of the paintings. For Hahn, these works are like film stills from a surrealist movie about a female Achilles, a perversion of the Greek myth, that has yet to be made. The paintings’ surface remains relatively flat, though complex with Hahn’s layering techniques of both scraping wet and sanding dry paint, creating filters and blurred lines, and the occasional element of spraypaint, all making the canvases, and the fleshy subject matter, appear attacked.
Like in his earlier series of 50 photorealistic watercolors of crime scenes or his feature-length bio-pic on the Unabomber, these new paintings are about the procedural, assembling clues in a documentary fantasy, privileging fiction over fact. The depths of literature as well as the movement of projected film can be allegorized as a motive for Hahn’s mechanics of painting, wherein he has set up his own classical story of fear and seduction, paranoia and vulnerability.
Also on display is his varicolored collection of ‘Unfinished Girl’ monotypes. In the context of this installation, the artist has referred to these quickly painted and transferred portraits as “a casting call for various Achillias.” The chance blurring and smearing created in the printing process does much of the work in creating the psychological story of his subjects. These prints are installed in the office alongside the same lithographic press from which they were pulled.
Andrew Hahn lives and works in Los Angeles.
Gallery open 12-6pm, Thursday - Sunday or by appointment.
