Artist Hannah Taurins’s dynamic, acid-tinged paintings portray groupie love as an ecstatic crush. Her second show at Theta, God, Let Me Be Your Instrument, longs for a halcyon era of glamour, using archival fashion editorials as an aesthetic reference to center the groupie’s peripheral role. The eleven new works form a loose narrative around the gallery, focusing on key phases of a groupie’s career: her Dionysian ascendence, her nonchalant death, and her mystical resurrection. In doing so, Taurins disputes the rock star’s positioning as some kind of cultural visionary, and the groupie’s role as his passive muse. Substituting rock-and-roll’s phallicism with fragmented imagery of the “girl in the crowd,” Taurins makes a camp spectacle of rock music’s alleged libidinal release.
Drawing on similar material from past works, Taurins’s paintings riff on drugs, psychoanalysis, art history, and pornography—often in one composition. In Spread (all works 2025), she bridges the high emotion of French salon-style Modernism with the dreamy seductiveness of a Guy Bourdin centerfold. The nude model lays across the pages, the magazine seam acting as censor. This fissure stifles the viewer’s fantasy, revealing how the editorial stages the reader’s desire. Even the work’s form is deceptive. At the outset, Spread looks like a diptych, preventing us from resolving our first impression of the painting. Here, Taurins signals an interest in how the editorial format toys with our lust.
Themes like spirituality, appropriation, and wellness readily coalesce under the spectre of pre-social media pop culture. In the back room, the fangirl’s insouciant demise, Groupies Live Forever, results in her salvation with works like the effulgent Locked In. Taurins skillfully blends colored pencil and gouache, making the texture seem waxy, dense, and limpid in turn. In some instances, like Hiatus or the playfully titled Disco Retirement, she refracts her ideas through a New Age framework in the vein of Madonna’s song “Shanti / Ashtangi” (1998). In a post-Goop world, delving into Eastern spirituality feels archetypal for white women. Still, Taurins manages to find an uncanny humor in this type of feminine excess.
Nostalgia undeniably animates the exhibition, and in certain moments, Taurins perhaps slides into this mode to avoid print media’s contemporary reverberations. In a show full of beautiful people, where does the toxicity of online fandoms, or stan culture, fit in? At one time, the romance of an editorial spread had the potential to mask fame’s inherent ugliness; Taurins allows audiences to indulge in sentimentality while bringing fresh insight to this bygone world. One senses the artist’s reverence for this industry, but rather than succumb to a jejune idealization of fashion, she embeds her critiques of the system in the execution of her work.
Taurins’s paintings invoke stylish vignettes and reinforce their model’s unique character. In Bad Girls Go Backstage, an inky, noirish portrait of Naomi Campbell, her eyes smoulder as she takes a sip from her glass, capturing the dizzying high of witnessing your idol perform. The dramatic lighting and intense black and white make the work feel cinematic, as though rendered in silver nitrate. In this painting and throughout God, Let Me Be Your Instrument, Taurins transforms the marginal groupie into a figure worthy of historical subjecthood.
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Hannah Taurins (b. 1997, Houston, Texas) lives and works in New York. She received a BFA from Cooper Union, New York. Recent solo exhibitions include: Chateau Shatto, Los Angeles (2023); Brant-Timonier, Palm Beach (2023); and Theta, New York (2022). Select group exhibitions include: High Art, Seoul, KR (2024); Spazio Amanita, New York, (2023); Shoot the Lobster, New York (2022); Venus Over Manhattan, New York (2022); In Lieu, Los Angeles (2022); and Entrance, New York (2022).
Joel Danilewitz is a critic and writer. His work on art, literature, and music has been published in Texte Zur Kunst, The Brooklyn Rail, Frieze, and others. He is based in New York.
