Arist to Watch: Caleb Hahne Quintana’s Introspective Paintings Beautifully Portray Everyday Routines
A September exhibition at Anat Ebgi in New York tracks the journey of a single subject across different chapters in his life
An avid reader with a newfound passion for short stories, Maspeth, New York–based artist Caleb Hahne Quintana looks to convey with his art what writers like the late Chilean author Roberto Bolaño say with words. “These hallucinatory tales exist on the outskirts of memory,” Hahne Quintana says of Bolaño, whose prose hints at other ways of revisiting the past. “I couldn’t just passively exist in his stories; I do with painting what I can’t do with language.”
In his art practice Hahne Quintana “similarly tries to allow the viewers to sink into the figures’ minds while examining their own worlds.” His introspective, pastel-toned paintings mostly portray coming-of-age men engulfed in the mundane nature of the day-to-day. They march into blaring sunsets, play guitar by the window, and share a cigarette with a companion.
Traces of the Mexican American artist’s upbringing in Colorado can be seen in illustrations of mountainous landscapes, which backdrop lingering emotions in a sun-drenched palette. The artist maintains a growing list of anecdotes from his grandmother about their family history as horse wranglers. The familial memories appear in the paintings under a dreamlike veil, such as two shirtless men riding their horses into a dusk-light washed sea in The Sound of a Setting Sun (2024). These otherworldly twists disarm the viewer and prompt a reading between the lines. As protagonists of their own myths, the youths dabble with the very moment of their existence, while Hahne Quintana looks back at fables passed onto him by his own kin.
Opening September 5, Hahne Quintana’s exhibition at Anat Ebgi in New York tracks the journey of a single subject across different chapters in his life rendered in darker tones like ultramarines, cadmiums, and browns. Instead of pivotal turning points, however, the artist conveys fleeting, inconsequential periods with open-ended plots. Towel drying after a quick dip or unwinding on a couch in the afternoon appears both grandiose and enigmatic under moody cinematic lighting. “That’s what I love about these new paintings; like a surrealist story, they’re not giving all the answers right away,” says Hahne Quintana.
A version of this article first appeared in print in our 2025 Fall Issue in the section “Artists to Watch.” Subscribe to the magazine.