WOLF KAHN — Tayloe Piggott Gallery

WOLF KAHN new works

WOLF KAHN new works

62 SOUTH GLENWOOD ST JACKSON WY 83001 TEL 307 733 0555 TAYLOEPIGGOTTGALLERY.COM

Plantation, 2013 oil on canvas 52 x 55 inches

Up the Hill, 2013 oil on canvas 36 x 52 inches

Celebrating Blue Gray, 2013 oil on canvas 36 x 40 inches

Cabin by a Brook, 2013 oil on canvas 32 x 30 inches

Red Ground, Gray Sky, 2013 oil on canvas 28 x 28 inches

Rose Runs Through It, 2013 oil on canvas 20 x 22 inches

Pale Orange, Pale Blue, 2013 oil on canvas 16 x 32 inches

Gray Foreground, 2013 oil on canvas 16 x 16 inches

Sky Verging on White, 2013 oil on canvas 16 x 16 inches

Three Trees, 2013 oil on canvas 20 x 22 inches

Green Under Green Trees, 2013 oil on canvas 22 x 22 inches

Barnside, 2010 pastel on paper 20 x 26 inches

Fog Bank, 2012 pastel on paper 14 x 22 inches

Greenhouse at Dawn, 2010 pastel on paper 12 x 18 inches

Green / Brown Foreground, 2012 pastel on paper 20 x 26 inches

High Horizon with Pink, 2012 pastel on paper 14 x 11 inches

Orange Barn, 2010 pastel on paper 20 x 25 inches

Translucent Tree Line, 2008 pastel on paper 20 x 25 inches

Treescape in Thalo Green, 2009 pastel on paper 15 x 22 inches

Warm-Toned Pastel, 2012 pastel on paper 15 x 20 inches

Where the Otters Played (Jackson, WY), 2008 pastel on paper 11 x 14 inches

Young Trees, Always Reaching, 2008 pastel on paper 17.5 x 20 inches

WOLF KAHN b. 1927, Stuttgart, Germany

Wolf Kahn grew up amid art – his father was the conductor of the Stuttgart Philharmonic Orchestra. At the onset of World War II, Kahn fled Germany and lived in England for a year before joining his family in the U.S. For secondary school, he attended the High School of Music and Art in New York City. Honing in on visual art, he studied with influential Abstract Expressionist Hans Hofmann, eventually becoming the artist’s studio assistant in New York and Provincetown.

Kahn works in a distinctly Post-Abstract realm where Hofmann’s influence continues to reverberate in Kahn’s mastery of chromatic tension and movement. Like Hofmann, Kahn considers nature a launching pad for exploration. Unlike his teacher, he translates forms found in nature into color fields.

By blurring the boundaries between pictorial landscape and painterly abstraction, he evokes an ethereal world, a world marked by epiphanies. This depth of insight comes from experience: before embracing art as a career, Kahn studied philosophy at the University of Chicago and spent six months logging in Oregon. Beyond Hofmann, Kahn closely communicates with Mark Rothko in his use of broad bands of color. Referencing natural and architectural forms, Kahn juxtaposes saturated and muted colors to achieve a subtle, tonal balance. His oeuvre also bears traces of Henri Matisse’s palette and the atmospheric qualities of American Impressionism.

Kahn’s color fields grow from his immersion outdoors: for decades, he has divided the calendar between New York City and southeastern Vermont. He spends summers with his wife, the painter Emily Mason, immersed in verdant Vermont. Come winter, he works in his NYC studio.

Defying his age, Kahn continues to produce a prodigious amount. Even though macular degeneration has impaired his eyesight, it has not impaired his artistic vision; some say it has even heightened his clairvoyance.

Kahn’s work lives within preeminent private and public collections: in New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and The Jewish Museum; the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston; the Hirshhorn Museum; and the National Museum of American Art in 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 and a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship.