Exceptional Works: Scott Kahn

Wolf Moon, 2023

Oil on linen 48 x 56 inches 121.9 x 142.2 cm

“Paint is an amazing medium. One can be enamored of it as a substance or as a conveyor of light. The material and ephemeral.”

—Scott Kahn

Scott Kahn, 2024. Photo by Jason Schmidt

Rooted in his everyday life and experiences, the work of American artist Scott Kahn (b. 1946) blends real and surreal elements. A seasoned painter who had been exhibiting steadily since the 1970s, Kahn began to garner widespread attention in 2018, a period that coincided with his friendship with fellow artist Matthew Wong, who cited Kahn as an important influence on his work and helped increase public awareness of Kahn’s practice. Kahn has since been the subject of numerous solo presentations in both New York and Paris.

Kahn is the recipient of two Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grants (1986 and 1995) and a residency at The Edward F. Albee Foundation in Montauk, New York (1975–1977). His work is held in institutional collections including the He Art Museum (HEM), Foshan, China; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; Long Museum, Shanghai; and the Rachofsky Collection, Dallas.

Featured on the occasion of the gallery’s presentation at Art Basel, 2024, Wolf Moon (2023) is a stunning example of Kahn’s enigmatic landscapes. Titled after the January full moon named for the howling of wolves in the dead of winter, the painting demonstrates Kahn’s use of a distinctive formal language to achieve nuanced and poetic renditions of the world around him.

Scott Kahn in his studio. Photo by James Chororos

Appearing in the darkest part of the year, the Wolf Moon is considered a harbinger of new energies and passions but is also seen to embody a feeling of duality and the channeling of inner conflicts. Here, Kahn divides the canvas roughly in half, essentially creating two interlocking but independent compositions that each inform the other. The moon hangs low, its large form seemingly floating in the center of a dark, starless night sky. Below, a field of bare trees rendered in fiery crimson and electric blue stretches into the distance, establishing a sense of depth that reinforces the illusion of the hovering moon.

Scott Kahn, Wolf Moon, 2023 (detail)

The moon appears throughout Kahn's body of work, frequently in the background of his paintings, as a sort of omen for the scene laid out beneath it. The present work belongs to a group of canvases that focus on the full moon, with its myriad connotations, as the central compositional element.

Scott Kahn, Berkshire Nightscape, 2005

Scott Kahn, For Matthew, Spring Moon, 2020

Scott Kahn, Late Afternoon, Late Autumn, 2007

“It would be wrong to call Kahn a Magritte of the American exurb and leave it at that…. [His] paintings … elude interpretation, not merely by their willful narrative ambiguity, but by a clarity of vision that approaches silence. In his quixotic insistence on cutting through the fog of feeling, Kahn finds unusual mystery.”

 

—Andrew L. Shea, The Brooklyn Rail, 2022

“If I’m really successful, the painting achieves some poetic transcendence.”

—Scott Kahn, 2021

David Zwirner at Art Basel

David Zwirner at Art Basel 2024