Gracie Hagen Headshot 2023
Gracie Hagen is an artist that currently resides in Chicago & is completely self taught. As a result, she's developed a unique aesthetic guided only by her desire to create the type of images that appeal to her. Her work has been featured on The Huffington Post, Beautiful Decay, The Daily Mail, & more. (She also works with private clients because she feels commercial portraiture fails to capture the subject in interesting ways. Her commissioned works can be found here.)

It is the honesty that draws her to photography & videography. The interesting complexity in people is what compels her to use the human form as the predominant subject. In her work she tries to capture questions about who we are & how we see ourselves. Her images serve to expose the open, vulnerable, & sometimes uncomfortable realities of our hidden nature. This process, revealing elements of our shared humanity, is fascinating; it allows her to simultaneously explore & illustrate feelings through her art while provoking social discourse.

She wants her work to show the core commonalities beneath our vast diversity. As such, her projects often features series where the angles, poses, & backdrops are unifying while the unique models & faces are as varied as humanity itself. We are all the same. We are all different. Even though multiple series contain unrelated themes, they are all illustrating unique parts of the same body.

Publications

Jolie June 2014
Q May 2014
Drawn Down Books March 2013
The Printed Blog August 2012

Galleries

Co[operative]-Incident 2021 Virtual
Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection 2019 Chicago, IL
Locallective 2015 Chicago, IL
The Kinsey Institute - Grunwald Gallery of Art 2015 Bloomington, IN
XOXO Erotica 2014 Vancouver, British Columbia
Hamilton Galleries 2014 Santa Monica, CA
Hauser Gallery 2013 Chicago, IL
Forté 2013 Chicago, IL