Wyatt Kahn: Signs

Vernissage on Friday, August 30, 6 – 8 pm
Artist talk with Elke Buhr, 6.30 pm

Galerie Eva Presenhuber is pleased to present its seventh solo exhibition by the New York-based artist Wyatt Kahn.

Kahn’s new body of work glows with luminous color. After more than a decade working in a severely reduced, largely all-white palette, the New York–based artist here works with an understated spectrum of greens, oranges, yellows, and blues. Made by adding paint to a mixture of beeswax and Turpentine—a procedure borrowed from Brice Marden—and applying it flatly with minimal brushwork, the smooth, matte surfaces absorb ambient light with quiet authority. Executed with remarkable restraint, the effect is retro, muted, even melancholy: A David Novros hanging in the waiting room of an East German psychoanalyst’s office.

From the start of his career, Kahn has experimented with a shifting pictorial glossary of quasi-universal signs—clip-art like symbols whose meaning is at once objective and deeply personal. Here, he whittles that vocabulary down to individual typographic units—letters and numbers—that allude at once to the history of the printing press, that modern invention par excellence, and, more narrowly, to Pop art’s disruptive assimilation of mass-produced commercial imagery into the realm of fine art. But in Kahn’s works, meaning has broken down. Abutting the letters and numbers are passages of abstraction, that other invention of modernity, which thwart our expectations of legibility and sense. Logic dissipates into an affective blur.