Maya Frodeman Gallery is pleased to present The Forest for the Trees, a solo exhibition with artist Wolf Kahn, on view at the gallery's downtown location from April 4th through May 18th, 2025. An opening reception will be held Friday, April 4th from 5 to 7pm. All are welcome to attend.
The preeminent colorist of a generation, it is impossible to understate Wolf Kahn’s role as a maverick, a painter who swam against the tides of his time. A second-generation New School artist following the lions of American Abstraction such as Rothko, Pollock, and de Kooning, among others, Wolf Kahn broke rank by returning to representational painting, mainly of landscapes.
A one-time lumberjack in his youth, Wolf Kahn’s enthusiasm for trees as subject matter resounds throughout this exhibition. Throughout his life, Kahn sought to translate landscapes, most often the heavily treed forested hills and valleys of the American Northeast, into light and color. Sometimes painterly, sometimes punctuated and jabbing, the viewer is brought into each brightly hued copse of trees and is captivated.
The trees themselves in Wolf Kahn’s paintings, however, differ radically in execution. Large swaths of color create the impression of a treed ridge in one painting; a chaotic tangle of vegetation brings the viewer into a weblike cobble of sunlit branches in the next. Trees become variegated vertical lines and branches short, terse horizontal stabs of color. We propose a varied curation of large and small paintings that shows Kahn’s breadth as a painter of trees, focusing on these different methodologies.
