WOLF KAHN
WOLF KAHN
June 6 – July 26, 2013
Selected Works
Press Release
“I am always trying to get to a danger point in color, where color either becomes too sweet or it becomes too harsh, it becomes too noisy or too quiet, and at that point I still want the picture to be strong, forceful, and the carrier of everything that a painting has to have: contrast, drama, austerity…” – Wolf Kahn
NEW YORK, NEW YORK – AMERINGER | McENERY | YOHE is pleased to announce an exhibition of recent paintings by Wolf Kahn. The exhibition will open 6 June and will remain on view through 26 July 2013. A public reception for the artist will be held 6 June from 6:00 to 8:00 PM. A fully illustrated catalogue accompanies this exhibition with a new essay by Nicholas Delbanco.
“This is neither a retrospective gathering nor an act of closure, but part of the accumulating whole...Still, a major selection of oils on canvas by a major artist at the age of eighty-five is an occasion for praise. As are the paintings themselves. Indeed, I think it fair to argue that this late-stage flowering is evidence of further growth, the sort of work that requires a large antecedent career. Let us consider what he is doing and what he has done; this exhibition is important both for what it represents and what it builds upon.” – Nicholas Delbanco
Wolf Kahn is a painter who embodies a synthesis of artistic traits – the modern abstract training of Hans Hofmann, the vivid palette of Matisse, Rothko’s sweeping bands of color, and the atmospheric qualities of American Impressionism. The coalescence of color, spontaneity, and representation has produced a rich and expressive body of work. Eighty-five years old, Kahn has dedicated his life to rendering the American landscape.
However, better understood as a colorist than a landscape painter, nature becomes a vehicle for Kahn’s palette. In the summer in Vermont, he may find a place outside to set up an easel and his pastels, but the oil paintings in this exhibition have been produced in his Manhattan studio.
Kahn’s landscapes are a fusion of memory, imagination, and invention. The land, the sky, and the trees, lakes, hills, and barns in between, are impressions and studies in color rather than the portrayal of any exact scene. Kahn states, “I’m toying with the idea of taking colors that everyone hates, and seeing whether I can give them a respectability, an austerity, and believability, because I love to use these colors.”
The paintings in this years exhibition were painted in 2011, 2012 and several were completed this year. The colors used demonstrate Kahn’s signature palette: purple, alizarin crimson, lemon yellow, thalo green. “What’s on offer in the gallery is a sampling of his recent work, the vivacity of execution remaining as agile as Kahn’s efforts of fourty or fifty years ago.”
Wolf Kahn was born in Stuttgart, Germany in 1927. He 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.
Having completed his degree in only one year, Kahn was determined to become a professional artist. He and other 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 has received a Fulbright Scholarship, a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, and an Award in Art from the Academy of Arts and Letters.
Traveling extensively, he has painted landscapes in Egypt, Greece, Hawaii, Italy, Kenya, Maine, Mexico, and New Mexico. He spends his summers and autumns in Vermont on a hillside farm, which he and his wife, the painter Emily Mason, have owned since 1968.
Wolf Kahn regularly exhibits 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 National Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C.; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA.
News
Wolf Kahn: A Lecture on Planning and Spontaneity in Art
Brattleboro Museum & Art Center
7 October 2012
Planning and Spontaneity in Art A Lecture by Wolf Kahn at the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center 7 October 2012 Wolf Kahn is a leading figure in American art. His rich, expressive body of work represents a synthesis of his modern abstract training with Hans Hofmann, the palette of Matisse, Rothko’s sweeping bands of color, and the atmospheric qualities of American Impressionism. Kahn has received many honors and awards, and his work is held in the collections of major museums worldwide.
Wolf Kahn's New York
The New York Sun, by Franklin Einspruch
17 July 2012
One usually associates the name of Wolf Kahn with New England landscapes, but his economically painterly treatment suits the urban fabric as ably. Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe has put together a show of his New York images to prove it.
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.