… Bringing new elements to an old story, Lynn Hatzius does not leave her lone figures with their head in hands, surrounded by scattered objects suggesting ultimately that emotional turmoil is abstract and impenetrable. Instead she uses a scalpel blade to literally cut beneath the surface making invisible interiority more transparent. Hatzius therefore illustrates - across her entire oeuvre - that even the most complex aspects of being human can become more accessible if connections are made between the mind’s inner workings, relationships and actual physical pain. In both Derailed and After the Quake, the female sitters are presented as ideal from outward appearances - poised, delicate and respectable - whilst from inside the viewer is invited to witness complete catastrophe, total breakdown and utter collapse. In the same way that Frida Kahlo depicts a broken ionic column as her spine in the 1944 painting The Broken Column to try to de-mystify anguish and to articulate emotional pain, Hatzius attempts the same using the site of a train crash and a scene of wartime bombings.  The Italian painter, Giorgio de Chirico also depicted people with cityscapes within to reveal their deepest feelings and fears and to confront the viewer with inner workings, rather than an outer veneer. Like that of Hatzius, his work is consistently metaphysical and poetic, with a tendency to repeat particular motifs, for example trains as seen in Derailed, and also empty arcades, as we encounter in the collage Waiting…

When Hatzius depicts couples rather than lone figures, the atmosphere changes and it is as though the union with another calms the violence of self-scrutiny… In a deeply romantic gesture, for Hatzius, a lover brings balance and becomes a landscape, all of potential and the whole world…