WOLF KAHN

Miles McEnery Gallery is delighted to announce an exhibition of works by Wolf Kahn, curated by M. Rachael Arauz, Ph.D., on view 30 October through 20 December 2025 at 520 West 21st Street. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue featuring an essay by Arauz.

Wolf Kahn painted the world around him with a reverent devotion. To Kahn, even the most familiar landscapes were a wellspring of limitless inspiration. By returning again and again to idyllic vistas, densely packed woods, and humble barns, he mined the same scenes for meaning, each canvas reflecting the subtle shifts of season or time of day while also satisfying his drive for material exploration. As a master colorist, his palette was not limited to the naturalistic or muted tones of traditional landscape painting; with vibrant oranges, pensive lilacs, and acidic greens, Kahn moved beyond mere representation and captured the complex interplays of himself within these changing surroundings.

M. Rachael Arauz, Ph.D., notes that Kahn’s paintings were “about chromatic experiments, the physicality of mark-making, and the fusion of plein air immediacy with sensory memory as he painted the rural landscape in his urban studio. They are also beautiful paintings of landscapes he knew intimately and properties he cared for. They are not coded critiques of environmental decay, nor are they celebrations of a conquering eye. Kahn’s constructions of landscape, however, direct the viewer to pay attention to what we think we see and to look again at the hidden spaces where disparate elements meet.”

Wolf Kahn (b. 1927 in Stuttgart, Germany) immigrated to the United States by way of England in 1940. In 1945, he graduated from the High School of Music & Art in New York, after which he spent time in the Navy. Under the GI Bill, he studied with renowned teacher and Abstract Expressionist painter Hans Hofmann, later becoming Hofmann’s studio assistant. In 1950, he enrolled in the University of Chicago. He graduated in 1951 with a Bachelor of Arts degree.

After completing his degree in only one year, Kahn decided to return to being a full-time artist. He and other former Hofmann students established the Hansa Gallery, a cooperative gallery where Kahn had his first solo exhibition. In 1956, he joined the Grace Borgenicht Gallery, where he exhibited regularly until 1995. Kahn received a Fulbright Scholarship, a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, an Award in Art from the Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Medal of Arts from the U.S. State Department.

Kahn married the artist Emily Mason in 1957. Their marriage lasted sixty-two years until Emily’s death in December 2019, just a few months before his passing. The pair lived and worked between New York City and West Brattleboro, Vermont.

Wolf Kahn regularly exhibited at galleries and museums across North America. His work may be found in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; The Hirshhorn Museum and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA.

Kahn died in 2020 in New York, at the age of 92.

Selected Works

Press Release