Wolf Kahn’s 'Barns' on View at the Gibbes Museum of Art

Friday, 01 September 2006 13:38

Charleston, SC – The Gibbes Museum of Art presents an exhibition of American beauty in Wolf Kahn’s Barns, on view through October 1.  This exhibition explores the concept of confrontation conveyed by a large, solitary structure in a simple, rural setting.  Featuring approximately 40 drawings and paintings, Wolf Kahn’s Barns showcases luminous works by one of American’s premier contemporary landscape painters.

In the book Wolf Kahn Pastels Kahn stated, “When I look at a barn, it is never the barn itself that engages me, but the way it grows out of the land, the way the sky and trees surround it, and how the horizon is interrupted by the barn’s silhouette.”

Wolf Kahn was born in Stuttgart, Germany in 1927 and immigrated to the United States at age thirteen.  Following graduation from New York City’s High School of Music and Art, Kahn served for one year in the United States Navy.  He then studied painting and printmaking at the New School for Social Research before enrolling in the Hans Hoffman School of Fine Arts in 1947.  Hoffman greatly impacted Kahn’s development as an artist, as did the relationships he forged with fellow students.  In 1952 Kahn and several Hoffman students organized the Hansa Gallery, a cooperative that would include such artists as John Chamberlain, Allan Kaprow, George Segal and Richard Stankiewicz.

Kahn explored a number of styles before finding his unique manner of artistic expression.  During the 1950s his influences included Vincent Van Gogh and Chaim Soutine, as evident with the bright colors and energetic brushwork of his paintings from this period.  In the early to mid 1960s Kahn worked in an Abstract Expressionist style with muted colors and simplified compositions.  He created his first barn painting in 1966, marking a shift in the direction of his work.  During the late 1960s Kahn began to employ a bolder color palette to create increasingly representational pastels and oils and throughout the 1970s, he continued to depict barns.  Kahn continues to explore barns today through the creation boldly-colored, light-infused pastels and oil paintings.