“In nature, light creates the color. In the picture, color creates the light.”
Kahn began to abstract the spaces where sky met barn, barn met the messy foreground, and the branches of a pecan tree interrupted and melted into the sky. The artist’s passion for monotypes resulted in the creation of many landscape compositions through which his subjects would “transcend the everyday...to represent an overarching insight.”
Kahn was the recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship, the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, and a National Medal of Arts. His work can be found in the permanent collections of over forty-five institutions including the National Gallery of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and Smithsonian American Art Museum.
For Wolf Kahn, the process of making monotypes was a creatively rewarding one. His process involved working in tandem alongside a master printer with zinc plates, large wet sheets of heavy Arches paper, and a massive etching press. A lush array of Caran d’Ache water-based crayon inks awaited as composition, scale and color were applied and ready for a single run through the etching press.
This exhibition explores Kahn’s printmaking, which is an embodiment of his mentor Hans Hofmann’s statement, “color creates the light.” Through studies of color in what one may regard as a romantic landscape, oak trees and barns are transformed from their everyday presence. “For an artist” he asserted, “it can often be said that when he’s looking, he’s working.” And it is in this process of looking that
