Maya Frodeman Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition of thirty oil paintings by Wolf Kahn from the artist’s estate, spanning from 2014 to his death in 2020. Created during the penultimate period of his career, these works offer an intimate view of Kahn’s enduring engagement with color, light, and the landscape.
Throughout his long career, Kahn developed a distinctive language of luminous color and expressive observation. Working between representation and abstraction, he transformed familiar landscapes into paintings defined as much by sensation as by place. The small scale of these works brings this exploration into close focus, emphasizing Kahn’s sensitivity to fleeting changes in light, atmosphere, and color.
Made during the final years of Kahn’s life, the paintings reveal an artist continuing to pursue the possibilities of the landscape with curiosity and conviction. Together, they provide a focused look at a late chapter in Kahn’s celebrated career.
Born in Stuttgart, Germany in 1927, Wolf Kahn fled Nazi Germany to Britain through the Kindertransport in the late 1930s. He eventually settled in the United States, where he completed high school and enrolled in the Navy. Following his service, he studied with the legendary teacher and Abstract Expressionist painter Hans Hofmann, before becoming his studio assistant. In 1950, he enrolled at the University of Chicago and completed his Bachelor of Arts degree within one year. In 1957, Kahn married artist Emily Mason. The pair lived and worked between New York City and West Brattleboro, VT. In March 2020, Wolf Kahn passed away at the age of 92 in New York, NY.
Wolf Kahn’s work has been exhibited at galleries and museums throughout North America. He was the recipient of the Fulbright Scholarship, the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, the Award in Art from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Medal of Arts from the State Department. His work is held in important museum collections including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; and The Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.
