NADA Miami Ingrid Hansen
Booth D200 December 2 - 6, 2025
Iowa is proud to participate in NADA Miami 2025 with a new series of paintings by New York-based painter Ingrid Hansen.
Drawing from a wide array of visual sources—including news media, paparazzi images, and film and television stills—Hansen explores the human condition and the complex, often chaotic nature of contemporary life. Her work reflects the influence of popular culture over the past several decades, functioning both as a singular artistic record of the last 35 years—her own lifespan—and as a mirror for viewers to examine their own experiences and motivations through familiar cultural imagery. Both artist and viewer engage in the shared processes of reading, translating, and interpreting visual indicators—practices that underscore our collective reliance on images to understand the world.
In a pair of works featuring Kate Moss and Johnny Depp, whose 1994 to 1998 romance was so uncanny and alluring as to inspire questions of their foreordination, Hansen explores the tension between authentic intimacy and performative desire. The union’s near-biblical status recalls the breeding of Jacobin pigeons, the result of centuries of intervention in the pursuit of perfection. Depicted in two of Hansen’s new works, Jacobin pigeons both demand their presence be acknowledged while also hiding diffidently behind their ornate, feathered cowls (they are named after the Jacobin order of monks, known for their hooded habits). This tension—the exaltation of beauty through manipulations of the natural order—recalls the ethical ruptures of Wolfgang von Goethe’s play Faust: The Tragedy, a narrative from which Hansen draws heavily in her work and which inspired her solo exhibition at Iowa, A Faustian Bargain (November 23 - January 19, 2025).
This is further evoked in Hansen’s portrait of Lady Gaga from the 2009 Video Music Awards, where she performed Paparazzi off her debut studio album, The Fame. The performance, visually baroque with pontifical nods, speaks to the promise of pain and agony inherent to fame, and features the performer hung from the ceiling and bloodied, the brutality and desperation of her desire on full display.
Ingrid Hansen, Froideur, 2025, oil on linen, 11 x 16 inches (27.94 x 40.64 cm) Ingrid Hansen, The Gamine, 2025, oil on linen, 11 x 16 inches (27.94 x 40.64 cm)
