Horseback 2014

Eckart Hahn made this painting of a horse, sometime after 1971. There's something about the mark-making that feels both incredibly precise and somehow tentative, as if the artist is feeling their way through the form. You can see the texture in the horse’s coat, the way the light catches the subtle curves of its muscles. Hahn uses thin layers of paint, almost like a glaze, to create this luminous effect. The color palette is muted – mostly browns and grays – but there are subtle shifts in tone that give the horse a sense of depth and volume. Look at the way the tail is rendered, each strand of hair distinct and yet part of a larger, flowing mass. It reminds me a little of Luc Tuymans' paintings, where the subject is rendered with a kind of detached coolness. This piece feels like a fragment, a glimpse of something larger. It invites us to fill in the gaps, to imagine the rest of the horse, the landscape around it, the story it might be a part of. And that, to me, is what makes art so endlessly fascinating.