Wolf Kahn: A 50 Year Survey

03.17.2018 - 05.12.2018

Jerald Melberg Gallery

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Jerald Melberg Gallery proudly presents Wolf Kahn: A Fifty Year Survey, a retrospective exhibition of paintings and pastels by the internationally acclaimed artist. New work will be shown alongside art from the past five decades, allowing viewers the opportunity to enjoy the subtle progressions Kahn has made in his career. Kahn has been represented by Jerald Melberg Gallery since opening in 1983 and this solo exhibition, presented in honor of his 90th birthday, marks his nineteenth with the gallery.

Wolf Kahn is widely considered the preeminent landscape painter in America. A master of both pastel and oil, Kahn is an artist who embodies the synthesis of his modern abstract training under the tutelage of Hans Hofmann, with the palette of Matisse, Rothko's sweeping bands of color, and the atmospheric qualities of American Impressionism. It is precisely this fusion of color, spontaneity and representation that has produced such a rich and expressive body of work with unmatched luminosity.

Born in Stuttgart, Germany in 1927, Wolf Kahn arrived in the United States in 1940 and in 1945 graduated from the High School of Music and Art in New York. After time in the Navy he attended classes taught by Stuart Davis and Hans Jelinek at the New School for Social Research. He then studied at the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Art in New York. In 1950 he enrolled in the University of Chicago from which he was graduated in 1951 with a Bachelor of Arts degree.

Wolf Kahn has been honored with numerous awards, including most recently the 2016 International Medal of Arts from the United States Department of State and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Academy of Design and School of Fine Arts.  A recipient of both Fulbright and Guggenheim Fellowships, he is an elected member of the National Academy of Design, the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and has served on the New York Arts Commission. Kahn’s work has been represented in countless solo exhibitions and can be found in the permanent collections of over 100 museums, including such prestigious institutions as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Mint Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

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