These paintings will be included in the show "Tobi Kahn: Metamorphoses," (see details below), a traveling museum show displaying the works of Tobi Kahn curated by Peter Selz and circulated by Council for Creative Projects. The show opened August 7, 1997 and will travel to eight museums across the United States over the next 2 years.
Tobi Kahn Metamorphoses
A traveling Museum Exhibition curated by Peter Selz
Circulated by Council for Creative Projects."Nature is a teacher who never deceives."
- Albert Pinkham RyderIn 1985, Tobi Kahn was one of nine artists whose work was selected for the Guggenheim Museum's national exhibition, New Horizons in American Art. In the decade that followed, Kahn's paintings and sculpture have been shown in over 20 solo exhibitions and over 60 museum and gallery group shows. His work has been acquired by major American museums and has been the subject of significant critical attention.
Curated by Peter Selz, who has followed Kahn's work steadily since the Guggenheim show, this traveling museum exhibit brings together the paintings and sculpture of an artist who extends an American tradition the distillation of the natural world into elemental forms.
Kahn's paintings are characterized by their powerful simplification; their alchemy of memory and dream; and their uneasy union of meditative tranquility and disturbing solitude. His acclaimed shrine series, devotional objects consisting of an architectural form surrounding a totemic image, range in scale from intimate maquettes to a bronze-and-stone outdoor sculpture (commissioned by Jane Owen and the Robert Lee Blaffer Trust for New Harmony, Indiana).
The exhibit reveals Kahn as an artist of both vision and virtuosity. The poetry of his color and the unique modulation of his surfaces create a primeval world of the unconscious. Defying fashion, Kahn has explored that world with painterly authority and a distinctive vocabulary. What animates all his art is the yearning of the human spirit for transcendence.
Representing a decade of work, this exhibition will be the first to explore the reciprocity between Kahn's painting and sculpture. It will be accompanied by a catalogue featuring an essay by Peter Selz, as well as essays by Dore Ashton and Michael Brenson.
Peter Selz comments:
Working with a subdued palette of subtle tonalities and corporal texture, Kahn has created paintings that can be seen as abstracted landscapes, seascapes, and skyscapes. But old distinctions between the figurative and abstract are meaningless in the ambiguous paintings by Kahn, who has stripped his experiences of the landscape to the essential organic energies of natural forms. His paintings belong to Romantic tradition of fantasy as seen in the work of American painters such as Albert Pinkham Ryder and Arthur Dove or the proto-Expressionist landscapes by Edvard Munch all dealing with the mysterious and impalpable aspects of nature.In the words of other art historians and critics:
Unlike much current biomorphic painting ... Tobi Kahn looks to nature, on its most expansive and most intimate scale, for his sources. And like the artists he names as his inspirations, among them Arthur Dove and Forrest Best, he has tapped into a vein that continues to yield rewards.
Holland Cotter, The New York TimesTobi Kahn's paintings are visual opiates. In his new work, rhythmic lines suggesting shapes lull the viewer into a dream state ... The mood, profoundly romantic, is Ryderesque in its melancholy, Redonesque in its mysticism. Landscape is the reference point of these abstractions, but it is a primordial landscape that Kahn evokes, a landscape stripped of detail, divorced from time and place, soaked in our collective memory.
Susan Kandel, Elizabeth Hayt-Adkins, ARTnewsAs early as 1977, Kahn fashioned shrines ... Whimsy mixed with ritual suggested a cross between Joseph Cornells intimate dreamscapes and Louise Nevelson's somber assemblages, but with Kahn's work, the idea of enclosure, the importance of housing objects within a kind of relinquary, has remained a central concern ...
Douglas Dreishpoon, ArtsEverything was shaped primarily by the imagination. This is most true of Mr. Kahn's slow-moving paintings, in which earth, water, and sky seem to fit together and find peace for a sustained but always precarious moment a subdued palette of subtle tonalities and corporal texture, Kahn has created paintings that can be seen as abstracted landscapes, seascapes, and skyscapes. But old distinctions between the figurative and abstract are meaningless in the ambiguous paintings by Kahn, who has stripped his experiences of the landscape to the essential organic energies of natural forms. His paintings belong to Romantic tradition of fantasy as seen in the work of American painters such as Albert Pinkham Ryder and Arthur Dove or the proto-Expressionist landscapes by Edvard Munch all dealing with the mysterious and impalpable aspects of nature.
Michael Brenson, The New York TimesKahn also exhibited sculptures that resemble small temples or shrines, simplified architectural boxes whose doorways contain tiny figures that look like effigies of a lost culture ... Taken as a whole, his work seems to aspire to an imagined or invented universe ...
Robert Edelman, Art in AmericaThese amoebalike forms spring into protoplasmic life, rubbing sensuously against each other as they push across the paper and press against its edges ... Forms that allude to birds, body parts, flowers, and volcanic fissures seem at once frozen, locked in place, and on the brink of flowing ... off the page.
Nancy Grimes, ARTnewsContents: 36 paintings; 18 shrine sculptures
Accompanying catalogue with essays by Peter Selz, Dore Ashton and Michael Brenson
Circulated by Council for Creative Projects
Two Pennsylvania Plaza, Suite 1500, New York, NY 10121Catalogue available after September 15, 1997 through the University of Washington Press: (206) 543-8870
EXHIBITION ITINERARY
Weatherspoon Art Gallery
The University of North Carolina at Greensboro
August 3 - October 26, 1997The Trout Gallery
Dickinson College, Carlisle, Pennsylvania
November 18, 1997 - January 24, 1998Museum of Contemporary Religious Art
Saint Louis University, St. Louis, Missouri
March 6 - May 8, 1998Thomas J. Walsh Art Gallery
Regina A. Quick Center for the Arts atFairfield University, Fairfield, Connecticut
May 23 - July 20, 1998Colby College Museum of Art
Waterville, Maine
August 12 - October 11, 1998The Museum of Fine Arts
Houston, Texas
November 8, 1998 - January 31, 1999Judah L. Magnes Museum and Graduate Theological Union
Berkeley, California
February 28 - May 26, 1999Skirball Cultural Center and Museum
Los Angeles, California
June 17 - August 26, 19991997 Council for Creative Projects, Inc. All rights reserved.
Lee, Massachusetts, and New York, New York
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 97-66919
ISBN: 1-890789-05-4
Survival Rites by Michael Brenson. 1997 Michael BrensonThis catalogue has been published with the generous support of the Robert Lee Blaffer Trust; Mitchell Investment Management Company, Inc.; The Green Fund; Armin and Ann C. Kessler; Charles A. and Ilana Horowitz Ratner; Rose and Morton Landowne; Tracey and Mark Bilski; Clyde Hershan; Sybil and Arthur Levine; and other funders.
None of this material may be reproduced without the expressed written consent of Mitchell and Company.
All artwork Copyright 1996 by Tobi Kahn. No artwork may be reproduced without the expressed written consent of Tobi Kahn and Mitchell and Company.
© 1997 Developed by Interactive Media Advertising Group, Inc.
