WOLF KAHN
WOLF KAHN
The City As Landscape
July 12 – August 17, 2012
Selected Works
Press Release
“I owe a great debt to the Impressionists, but an equal one to early American modernists. The breadth of these influences may be due to my European origins. However, inspiration comes even more from the changes in seasons, the hours in the day, and one’s available enthusiasm. Such stimulation offers a catalog of visual pleasures, a catalog that is so richly provided by New York, the city of cities.” -Wolf Kahn
New York, New York – Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe is pleased to announce an exhibition of works by Wolf Kahn. The City As Landscape will open on 12 July 2012 and will remain on view through 17 August 2012.
The City As Landscape offers a glimpse into Wolf Kahn’s New York. In the city of New York and in the Vermont countryside, Kahn has spent his life rendering the essence of the landscape of the places he calls home. Kahn captures his New York experience and shares this imagery with us in the mediums of oil and pastel where skyscrapers and buildings dominate the skyline rather than screens of trees and rural barns. He presents the landscapes and the landmarks of the city as seen from the windows of his studio and viewed while perusing his neighborhood on daily walks. In these particular works, Kahn conjures the beauty, charm and grandeur of New York, “the city of cities.”
Wolf Kahn was born in Stuttgart, Germany in 1927, arriving in the United States in 1940. After serving in the US Navy, he studied with Hans Hofmann in New York and in Provincetown, where he became Hofmann’s assistant. His first one-man show was at the Hansa Gallery in 1953 (it was reviewed in ArtNews by painter and critic Fairfield Porter, who wrote “the excellence of this first exhibition…comes as no surprise.”) His work has since been the subject of numerous national and international exhibitions.
Kahn’s work may be found in public collections including 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 Jewish Museum, New York, NY; The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; The Hirshorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. and The National Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C.
Kahn is a member of the National Academy of Design and the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the recipient of numerous awards including a Fulbright Scholarship, a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and an Award in Art from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
The artist lives and works in New York City and Vermont.
News
Wolf Kahn
Brattleboro Pastels
Brattleboro Museum, 28 September 2011 - 5 February 2012
Wolf Kahn spends much of his summer sketching in pastel in and around Brattleboro, Vermont, later refining the sketches in his hilltop studio. BMAC is honored to present a portion of his summer 2011 artistic production.
Pastel is Kahn’s generative medium. I use the term generative not to imply that his pastels are sketches for paintings — though they may be. Rather, the mark a pastel stick makes, the way its powder sits on the page, its texture, its effects are the genesis of his painting style. Kahn has often referred to his painting technique as scrubbing: he makes dry, quick lines, atop thinly layered veils of color, essentially transferring his touch with pastel to paint. His virtuosic handling of the medium he calls “dust on butterfly wings” informs and expands all his artistic endeavors.
Wolf Kahn
Brattleboro Pastels, Opening reception & Book-Signing
Brattleboro Museum, Saturday 1 October 2011, 5 -7PM
Be among the first to view the new exhibit Wolf Kahn: Brattleboro Pastels, featuring new work created this summer in southern Vermont by one of America’s most influential and admired landscape artists. Kahn will be on hand to sign books, limited-edition prints, catalogues, posters, and more. Cash bar and light refreshments provided.
Wolf Kahn
In Latter-Day Focus, Color & Consequence
The Brooklyn Rail, July 2011
Kahn works a canvas with the relentlessness of the rising tide. Several times during a visit to his studio, I would become enamored by a finished and already framed painting, only to have Kahn point at a certain spot in it that, to his mind, required more yellow there, or a more intense blue here. His painting is always incomplete—another precious contribution of sensibility art to this packaged culture of ours. Can you imagine Damien Hirst or Jeff Koons obsessing about a square inch of one of the large concoctions they have others illustrate from their photoshop compositions?
Wolf Kahn: Technicolor Fields
Art + Auction
June 2011
Wolf Kahn’s recent paintings, continuing his long engagement with rural New England as fodder and muse, still manage to startle and delight.