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September Issue 2006
Eva Carter Gallery in Charleston, SC, Features Works by Wolf Kahn
Eva Carter Gallery in
Charleston, SC, is pleased to present the work of Wolf Kahn. Ranging
from abstracted spatial studies to landscapes, over two-dozen
paintings, pastels, and monotypes will be on view from Sept. 1
through Nov. 11, 2006.
Kahn is a vanguard of American representational art and one of
the most highly regarded colorists working in America today. The
work of Wolf Kahn is unique in its fusion of Realism, Color Field
painting, and Expressionism. He combines a characteristically
modern perspective with a nod to the atmospheric qualities of
American Impressionism.
Kahn was born in Stuttgart, Germany in 1927. His affluent grandmother, who encouraged an interest in art, raised him. When war broke out, Kahn was sent with a group of refugee children to England. His grandmother was later murdered at Theresienstadt concentration camp. Kahn lived with foster families until, in 1940, he was able to immigrate to the United States and re-join his family.
Kahn graduated from
the High School of Music and Art in New York and soon after joined
the Navy. Under the GI Bill he studied with the well-known teacher
and abstract expressionist Hans Hofmann, becoming Hofmann's studio
assistant. After earning a BA from the University of Chicago in
1951, he and other former Hofmann students (Lucus Samarus, George
Segal, John Camberlain, among others) established a cooperative
gallery where he had his first one man show. His work quickly
attracted attention, and by the mid-fifties, he was exhibiting
regularly in art galleries.
For over fifty years, Kahn has been teaching, traveling, lecturing,
and, above all else, painting. He is the recipient of a Fulbright
Scholarship, a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, and an Award
in Art from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Kahn is
a member of the National Academy of Design, as well as the American
Academy of Arts and Letters, and he has recently completed an
appointment to the New York City Art Commission.
Selected museum collections include Metropolitan Museum of Art,
New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of
Fine Arts, Boston; Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC; Los Angeles
County Museum, Los Angeles. The Harry A. Abrams Publishing Company
has released three major books about Wolf Kahn and his art. Kahn
divides his time between New York City and his farm near Brattleboro,
VT.
Traveling extensively,
he has painted landscapes in such diverse locales as Maine, Mexico,
Italy, Kenya, New Mexico, Hawaii, and South Carolina. His scenic
Lowcounty paintings highlighted the exhibition, Wolf Kahn:
Painting in the South, 1999, at the Morris Museum of Art and
Jerald Melburg Gallery. According to Kahn, "As I get to know
the South better I recognize that each region has its own accents,
habits, history, all of which are reflected in the look of the
landscape."
Kahn sees barns as the agrarian symbols of America. Fascinated
by their colors, texture and materials, as well as distinctive
forms and profiles, he focuses many of his abstracted landscape
paintings on the barn structure. Kahn has developed a unique style
of art making, one that bridges the expressionist movement of
the 1950s and classic American landscape painting. His pastel
paintings are executed with a painterly freedom and spontaneity
in order to document the life around him. Coinciding with the
exhibition at Eva Carter Gallery, the Gibbes Museum of Art in
downtown Charleston is presenting the exhibit, Wolf Kahn's
Barns, on view through Oct. 1, 2006.
This exhibition is presented in cooperation with Jerald Melberg Gallery, Charlotte, NC.
Also featured will be the bold and brilliant abstract expressionist paintings of William Halsey and Eva Carter, both nationally known and collected.
For further information
check our SC Commercial Gallery listings, call the gallery at
843/722-0506 or at (www.evacartergallery.com).
Carolina Arts is published monthly by Shoestring Publishing
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Copyright© 2006 by PSMG, Inc., which published Charleston
Arts from July 1987 - Dec. 1994 and South Carolina Arts
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