WYATT KAHN
Life in the Abstract

Art in the Gardens, LongHouse, East Hampton, NY, US
April 1 – December 31, 2023

Over the past ten years, Kahn has examined the spatial relationship between painting and sculpture to construct a visual vocabulary of representational and abstract forms that integrate formal concerns with materials from everyday life. His new works are playful narrative compositions with oversized figurative icons taken from domestic life. For instance, in Parade, a foot is about to crush a lightbulb.  Each sculpture comprises numerous sections of steel that have been welded together into block-like forms, their front and back mirroring each other to create an illusion of drawing in space. The deep, rusted red tone of the sculptures is a result of the natural weathering process of Cor-Ten steel, contrasting with the lush green foliage the LongHouse garden.

Read more about the exhibition here.

WYATT KAHN
Life in the Abstract

Public Art Fund, City Hall Park, New York, NY, US
June 8, 2022 – February 26, 2023

Wyatt Kahn (b. 1983, New York, NY) has examined the relationships between painting and sculpture throughout his career. He has constructed a distinctive visual vocabulary of geometric and representational forms that integrate aesthetic concerns with quotidian objects. Life in the Abstract is Kahn’s first public art exhibition, comprising seven new monumental sculptures fabricated in Cor-Ten steel.

Each sculpture juxtaposes components adapted from Kahn’s abstract canvas paintings with “readymade” items like eyeglasses, clock, comb, hand, foot, and other elements from his domestic life. The artist translated seventeen line drawings into large welded steel blocks and arranged them in ways that suggest imaginative narrative compositions. The subtle, painterly nuance of their weathered rusted surfaces expands Kahn’s dialogue between painting and sculpture. Sited in City Hall Park, the works open a conversation between the private sphere of the artist’s life and the public realm of urban architecture, landscape, and infrastructure. Life in the Abstract adds to the lineage of modernist public sculpture, infusing it with both playfulness and rigor, reminding us that the creation of abstract ideas and the business of daily life go hand in hand. 

The exhibition is curated by Public Art Fund Adjunct Curator, Daniel S. Palmer

Read more about the exhibition here.

WYATT KAHN
Paintings and Sculptures

Wyatt Kahn’s (b. New York, 1983; lives and works in New York) work hovers between two and three dimensions, reviving aspects of American 1960s Minimal Art. In the tradition of minimalist abstraction, his multipart paintings seem devoid of content, but their construction is a sophisticated choreography of geometric shapes. Instead of delineating them on the canvas itself, he transforms them into physical elements composed of canvas stretched over strips of wood that he mounts on the wall as reliefs, making the latter an integral part of the composition. Working on the interface between painting and sculpture, the artist also references Ellsworth Kelly’s single and multiple shaped canvases.

Wyatt Kahn’s works are held by major collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Dallas Museum of Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo.

Purchase publication here.