JACKSON HOLE, WYOMING – TAYLOE PIGGOTT GALLERY is pleased to present Wolf Kahn: Selected Works (1983 - 2016), a solo exhibition of paintings spanning four decades by the legendary colorist, who died in March 2020, on view August 3rd through September 17th, 2023. An opening reception will be held on Thursday, August 3rd, from 5 - 8 pm. All are welcome to attend.
Wolf Kahn presents a selection of oil paintings from the artist’s estate dating from the end of his long life back to the early eighties. Each work on canvas was selected to speak to a painterly vernacular close to the artist’s practice, whether the soft, glowing landscape and barns of Tobacco Valley (AKA Tobacco Barns) (1983) or the emotional tangles of undergrowth in Pale Pink, Charged with Energy (2009), to the large swaths of color he employed in Strip of Yellow Pasture in West Brattleboro (2005). Over the course of his career, Kahn returned to these familiar executions of landscape, his playful brushstrokes rendering each painting with its own, fresh narrative. Still, these ‘landscapes’ are certainly abstracted, trees relegated to variegated vertical lines and branches short, terse horizontal stabs of color. Kahn brought the energy and bold color of Abstract Expressionism to landscape painting.
Perhaps the preeminent colorist of a generation, Wolf Kahn descends from an amalgam of enigmatic artistic sources including American Realism, Color Field painting, and Abstract Expressionism. It’s clear he always made his own rules, and perhaps as a rule, broke them. 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.
Born in Stuttgart, Germany, in 1927, Wolf Kahn fled at thirteen to London via the Kindertransport, and thereon to the United States, where he was eventually reunited with his father, a well-known conductor of the orchestra. In 1945, he graduated from the High School of Music and Art in New York after which he spent time in the Navy. Under the GI Bill, he studied with the well-known teacher and abstract expressionist, Hans Hofmann, becoming Hofmann's studio assistant. In 1950, he enrolled in the University of Chicago as part of the Hutchins Chicago Plan, graduating after only eight months.
He returned to New York, determined to become a full-time artist. He and other former 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. In 1960, his work was included in a major exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art titled Young America 1960: 30 Painters under 36. Kahn has received a Fulbright Scholarship, a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, and an Award in Art from the Academy of Arts and Letters. His work found in the permanent collections of most major art museums in the United States including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Whitney Museum of America Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, among others. In addition, Kahn’s works regularly form the centerpiece of numerous group exhibitions and solo shows in galleries and museums throughout the United States and abroad.
Wolf Kahn adhered to a strict non-program program. Even at the end of his life, he was still very much a student of Hans Hofmann. There was an affectionate contrariness about him and the way he described his work. “I try not to,” he said. “I never want to look at it the way an outsider would. There’s a certain mystery in making paintings, and I don’t want to destroy that. What people think art’s about is not always what it’s about. Lately I’ve decided my painting isn’t about describing places or things, it’s much closer to just an expression of enthusiasm.”
