Wyatt Kahn

Wyatt Kahn is primarily known for his investigations into the visual and spatial relationship between painting and sculpture. Using unprimed canvases stretched over wooden frames, Kahn assembles complex wall-mounted works in which the gaps between the individual canvases give rise to abstract or pictorial compositions. Rather than tracing the lines and shapes directly onto the canvas itself, he turns them into physical components of the artwork. Referencing the tradition of minimalist abstraction, Wyatt Kahn’s monochrome multi-panel ‘paintings’ are informed by a desire to explore non-illusory forms of representation. In essence, their subject becomes the interplay between two and three dimensions, as experienced via shifts in surface, structure and depth. In Kahn’s work, the wall upon which the work is hung becomes an integral part of the composition. Interested in a painting’s potential to function as the very embodiment of the object it depicts, Kahn has also developed works in which the shaped stretchers combine to create the form of an actual object, while a synthesis of hand-drawn motifs and words epitomize its essential qualities.

Wyatt Kahn (b. 1983) lives and works in New York. Recent solo exhibitions were held at Museo di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto; Trento (2016) and at the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis, MO (2015). His work is included in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; MOCA, Los Angeles; Dallas Museum of Art; MCA, Chicago; and Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo.